Following in the footsteps of the Langley Schools Music Project, here is the PS22 Chorus. In their repertoire, Lady Gaga, Journey, Survivor, Fleetwood Mac, Styx, Tori Amos, Coldplay, and many others. The video above is the The Cure's "Pictures of You." The PS22 numbers aren't nearly as haunting as the Langley Schools tracks but are still captivating, touching, and weirdly quite lovely. PS22 Chorus (Thanks, Gabe "TuneUp" Adiv!)

Archeopteryx writes "According to Wired's 'Gadget Lab' blog, Snow Leopard's next update, OS X 10.6.2, will block the Atom processor and will disable many 'Hackintosh' netbooks. It is indeed true that OS X will run just fine on some netbooks if you install the right drivers and ktexts, but Apple's EULA has always specified that the license was applicable only to Apple hardware. There have always been processor types specified in OS X and that have to be worked around now for those who want to use an Atom or similar non-Apple-adopted processor, so this is likely no more than a hiccup on the road for the OSX86 crowd. But, it raises the question: is it time for Apple to sell a license for non-Apple hardware — priced accordingly of course — for those people who want OS X on platform types Apple has not yet adopted, like the netbook? The only reason OS X is not on my Eee is that I want to comply with the licensing terms. I could just pay for a license to use it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Archeopteryx writes "According to Wired's 'Gadget Lab' blog, Snow Leopard's next update, OSX 10.6.2, will block the Atom processor and will disable many 'Hackintosh' netbooks. It is indeed true that OSX will run just fine on some netbooks if you install the right drivers and ktexts, but Apple's EULA has always specified that the license was applicable only to Apple hardware. There have always been processor types specified in OSX and that have to be worked around now for those who want to use an Atom or similar non-Apple-adopted processor, so this is likely no more than a hiccup on the road for the OSX 86 crowd. But, it raises the question: is it time for Apple to sell a license for non-Apple hardware — priced accordingly of course — for those people who want OSX on platform types Apple has not yet adopted, like the netbook? The only reason OSX is not on my Eee is that I want to comply with the licensing terms. I could just pay for a license to use it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was doing a little work in the back yard yesterday when I cam across a praying mantis. I don't see too many, and this one was a handsome specimen so I took a couple of photos. I also shot a video, but he didn't do much other than lick his foreleg for a while. Maybe I'll upload it later on.

While we keep hearing record execs and politicians bemoaning the state of the recording industry, UK music critic John Harris has written up a great article at the BBC pointing out how wrong they are, and noting that this is the "golden age of infinite music." Indeed. This is exactly what we've been saying for years, though not as eloquently as Harris:

Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled.

At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr.

Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer.

Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity - whether illegally or not - to indulge it. He is a paid-up fan of bands it took me until I was 30 to even discover - and at this rate, by the time he hits his 20s, he'll have reached the true musical outer limits.

What does all this tell us? Clearly, for anyone raised in the old world, the modern way of music consumption has all kinds of unforeseen benefits.

He notes that smarter musicians are realizing they can't just offer up "filler" material any more, but need to focus on music that's actually good, and that the industry itself needs to change:

So, yes, the record industry may yet have to comprehensively reinvent itself, or implode. Sooner or later, given that the need to read reviews before deciding what to listen to is fading fast, I rather fear that even music journalists may be rendered irrelevant.

But for now, this is a truly golden age - the era of the teenage expert, albums that will soon have to be full of finely-honed hits and the completely infinite online jukebox.

Even if the music business manages to somehow crack down on illicit downloading and claws back a few quid via annual subscriptions in return for that self-same endless supply of music, the same essential rules will apply. Really: what's not to like?

The one area where I disagree with Harris, is that he seems to think that this will push some artists to focus on creating more "hits" rather than more thoughtful music that "grows" on people. I'm not so sure of that (and I haven't seen it in the niche areas of music that I follow). Instead, because communities build up around certain artists or music genres, the community actually does a good job promoting the music and giving it life, rather than relying on it being a massive "hit."

We've said it before, and it should be said again: nearly everything about the music industry today is better. More music is being made than ever before. More people are making music than ever before. More people are listening to new music than ever before. More musicians are making money from music than ever before. Even more musical instruments are being sold than ever before. The only thing suffering is the sale of plastic discs (though, the sales of iPods are doing quite well). The problem isn't the music industry. The problem is with a certain small group of businesses who built their business on the concept of selling plastic discs.

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elREG writes to mention that Sun's ZFS now has built-in deduplication utilizing a master hash function to map duplicate blocks of data to a single block instead of storing multiples. "File-level deduplication has the lowest processing overhead but is the least efficient method. Block-level dedupe requires more processing power, and is said to be good for virtual machine images. Byte-range dedupe uses the most processing power and is ideal for small pieces of data that may be replicated and are not block-aligned, such as e-mail attachments. Sun reckons such deduplication is best done at the application level since an app would know about the data. ZFS provides block-level deduplication, using SHA256 hashing, and it maps naturally to ZFS's 256-bit block checksums. The deduplication is done inline, with ZFS assuming it's running with a multi-threaded operating system and on a server with lots of processing power. A multi-core server, in other words."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Microsoft said today that computers in countries with high rates of software piracy are more likely to be infected because users are leery of applying security patches. 'There is a direct correlation between piracy and the malware infection rate,' said Jeff Williams, head manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. Highlighting research that showed worms to be the most prevalent computer security problem today, Williams said the link between PC infection rates and piracy is due to the hesitancy of users of pirated software to use Windows Update. China's piracy rate is more than four times that of the US, but the use of Windows Update in China is significantly below that in this country. Same for Brazil and France. But Microsoft's own data doesn't always support William's contention that piracy, and the hesitancy to use Windows Update, leads to more infected PCs. China, for example, boasted a malware infection rate — as defined by the number of computers cleaned for each 1,000 executions of the MSRT — of just 6.7 per thousand, significantly below the global average of 8.7 or the US's rate of 8.2. France's infection rate of 7.9 in the first half of 2009 was also below the worldwide average."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MikeChino writes to mention that the European Space Agency has launched a pair of satellites, one that will pinpoint accurately the future location and intensity of floods and droughts, and the other aimed at testing new tech. Launched on a Russian rocket launcher from the Plesestk cosmodrome, the SMOS probe will measure soil moisture, plant growth, and ocean salt levels across the globe. The measurements gathered by the SMOS probe can be used to track ocean circulation patterns and soil moisture — data that can be used to predict quickly drought and flood risk in certain areas, as well as the intricacies of the planet's climate cycle. The other satellite, a smaller demonstration probe dubbed Proba 2, will test 17 new technologies ranging from a new wide-angle view camera to a xenon-fed resistojet thruster.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first time I saw a circuit board where the board designer had broken through the boundaries of a grid pattern and made traces that curved playfully and made decorative shapes, it was a revelation. You can make a PCB any damn shape you please! (So long as it takes into account the component shapes and doesn't get too confusing.) Too often we get stuck in rigid modes of thinking about the world. I love it when people tweak those tunnel realities a little. This painted saw, spotted on Dinosaurs and Robots, is a perfect example. I've seen a few shop tools maybe painted a non-factory-issued color, or with some bumper stickers and tool company logos, etc. on them, but have never seen one tricked-out painted just for fun and aesthetic pleasure. Why not? This saw was done by custom guitar painter Sarah Ryan, for Creston Lea's bandsaw.

Okay, here's one reason not to paint your shop tools. It apparently attracts snakes! (See story on the link.)

Creston Lea's Bandsaw Painted by Sarah Ryan

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Here are complete instructions (software, source code, build manual, hardware) for an autonomous sentry gun that will shoot anything that moves.

DIY autonomous sentry gun

One thing that never made much sense was how vehemently the big e-voting manufacturers fought pretty much every single attempt to let outside computer security experts try hacking their machines. They often made excuses about how this wouldn't be fair under "non-real-world conditions," but never explained how it would be bad to at least let these hacks proceed to learn from them and use them to strengthen the overall security of the machines. Thankfully, it looks like voting officials in other countries are a bit more open to this concept. Slashdot points out that Brazil opened up a "challenge" allowing security experts and other hackers to request to take part in a big hack attempt on e-voting equipment. Not only that, but the government is going to give $5,000 to whoever successfully hacks into one of the e-voting systems. This seems like a much smarter way to check the security on these machines than the previous method of very basic gov't oversight and the e-voting firms issuing a big "trust us," answer to every question.

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Add this one to clever makeup-based Halloween costumes.. "Low Resolution"...

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Elizabeth says: "Robert Crumb hasn't been doing any TV interviews, and is only doing one radio interview, but we did tape his B&N event in New York last week.  It's pretty much the only visual record of what he thinks of Genesis, and is a great look into his creative process.

The video of Robert Crumb's dialogue with Francoise Mouly at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square filmed on 10/23 is now available on Fora.tv. The 47-minute video features Crumb discussing his childhood, early life, married/family life, and his new book THE BOOK OF GENESIS ILLUSTRATED.

R. Crumb in Conversation with Francoise Mouly

Last Friday night, this piece of "blood"-soaked "meat" (which is, I think, actually some kind of dyed latex product) was smeared bodily about my face and neck by a large man, who may or may not be named "Thor," dressed as a butcher, at the 2009 annual Scare for a Cure haunted house, held each year at the palatial Austin estate of video-game entrepreneur Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. I paid a couple of extra bucks for the special glowing red chemiluminescent necklace that identified me as amenable to the "extreme," full-contact version of the experience, and I'm so glad that I did.

My friend, Christie, got about a bucket of "blood" "vomited" onto her head by a ceiling-mounted ghoul, and came out looking like Carrie on prom night. I saw it happen, and the moment is frozen for me like a scene from a Dario Argento movie: Christie's blond locks, suffused by a pale, flickering, blue-green backlight, her mouth slightly open as she looks up, laughing, into the torrent of black, sticky ichor that tumbles, in exaggerated slow motion, onto her face. In my mind's eye, I can still see my own gaping mouth reflected in a small, spherical droplet of that blood as it spatters across space and time. I think that droplet will be falling, in my memory, for many years to come.

Thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard to make this such an incredible event. If you missed it this year, go mark your calendars now.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PDT, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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A new format specification has reached consensus among web and type designers and is being backed by Mozilla. Dubbed Web Open Font Format (WOFF), it is an effort to bring advanced typography to the Web in a much better way. Support for the new spec will be included as a part of Firefox 3.6 which just recently hit beta. "WOFF combines the work Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font's origin and licensing. The format doesn't include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors — this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new format specification has reached consensus among web and type designers and is being backed by Mozilla. Dubbed Web Open Font Format (WOFF), it is an effort to bring advanced typography to the web in a much better way. Support for the new spec will be included as a part of Firefox 3.6 which just recently hit beta. "WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font's origin and licensing. The format doesn't include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four graphs created by the International Federation of Health Plans that compare how much US residents and people in other countries pay for health care. As Jay Livingston of the Montclair SocioBlog says, "Our Lipitor must be four to ten times a good as the Lipitor that Canadians take."

Lavie Tidhar's story "Spider's Moon" is up on Futurismic, and it's a very rewarding ten-minute read. Futurismic's short-short fiction department publishes some genuinely wonderful science fiction, bite-sized stories that contain actual characters and settings and plots in impossibly small packages.

"Spider's Moon" is no exception: a story about spacefaring South Seas Islanders who come to Earth seeking mass-produced Vietnamese technology, and of what transpires; told with an admirable lyricism and poesie.

Melkior felt a little lost at Hoi An. He had arrived three days before, taking a room in a small hotel just outside the old town. It was, in many ways, a disconcerting experience. Once, Hoi An had been a trade centre, the meeting place of Chinese and European merchants on the coast of Viet Nam, and the old town had been preserved just as it had been, full of charming little cobbled streets and charming little temples and charming old houses - "Charm," the brochure insisted, "is the defining characteristic of the town". The old town was a bubble out of time, and visiting it was a wilful act of time-travel, or so it seemed to Melkior. The Hoi An lanterns ("Famous for hundreds of years," boasted the brochure) still hung everywhere, and barges still travelled down the river, pushed on long poles - and yet it was a lie, too, for the past was not really there, only its semblance, and who could believe in the past (not less a gentle, charming past) under the full spider's moon?

Crossing from the old town into the new was a disorienting fast-forward into the future: here, beyond the bubble of preserved time, the future happened with every heartbeat, the sound of construction filling the days, houses and office towers rising higher and higher into the atmosphere, as if grasping for the moon. He was here for the new town, not the old; was here for the future, not the past. The juxtaposition of both unsettled him. It had occurred to him he should have stayed in Da Nang, a forty-five minute drive down the road, a busy, bustling, cheerful city that had nothing of the quaint or picturesque (as the brochure had put it). Hoi An was a tourist town, famed for its tailors and shoe-makers, and even Melkior had given in to that extent, having purchased a new, sombre black suit and two pairs of custom-made knock-off trainers, with the company logo hand-stitched into the thin leather. He wore them now, feeling the cobblestones beneath the thin soles.

Spider's Moon By Lavie Tidhar

coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has started down the road to reinvention with the addition of four new committees to the external advisory group that drives the agency's direction. "The four new committees include Commercial Space, Education and Public Outreach, Information Technology Infrastructure, and Technology Innovation. The council's members provide advice and make recommendations to the NASA administrator about agency programs, policies, plans, financial controls and other matters pertinent to NASA's responsibilities. In the realm of commercial space, NASA has been pushed by outside experts to leave low Earth orbit flights to other aerospace firms. The Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee report recently took that a step further in recommending: A new competition with adequate incentives to perform this service should be open to all US aerospace companies. This would let NASA focus on more challenging roles, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit based on the continued development of the current or modified NASA Orion spacecraft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I remember reading a book years ago that mentioned a CIA plan in the early 1960s to sprinkle thallium salts into Castro's boots, which "would cause his beard, eyebrows, and pubic hair to fall out... like a follicle deprived Samson."

Today, I listened to this catchy Tin Pan Alley song called "If Butch the Rough Barber Man Shaves Castro." Why did people in the 1960s think Castro's hair was so magical?

"If Butch the Rough Barber Man Shaves Castro" Thanks to WFMU's Bob Purse for finding this 45 and converting it to an MP3!

We've seen a bunch of stories lately about schools handing out discipline for activities done online, and conflicting court cases on the subject make it fairly unclear where a school's authority to discipline students ends. In the latest case, two sophomore high school girls posted private photos to their MySpace accounts from a sleepover. The photos are described as "racy." While they were set to private, someone copied them, and eventually school administrators saw them and banned the girls from extracurricular activities for a while and also required that the two girls apologize to the (all male) coaches' board. It also required the girls to undergo therapy sessions. All this because they posted some silly photos online? Beyond the question of whether or not the school even has the right to discipline these students for events that had nothing (at all) to do with the school, the punishment also seems to go well beyond the "crime." Kids do silly/stupid things all the time. And, yes, these days there are cameraphones and social networks that make these things easier to record and distribute, but it doesn't change the fact that kids are kids. I doubt there are many adults out there today who didn't do something silly or stupid as a teen. For those of you who are a bit older, imagine if cameraphones and social networks had been around then? Would you have wanted to have been suspended from school activities? The whole thing seems like a huge overreaction.

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RFID card readers becoming passé? Maybe what you need to guard the door to your high-tech lair is a secret knock detecting door lock. Using an Arduino and a bunch of parts found around the lab, Steve Hoefer built a device that unlocks your door when it receives a certain knock pattern. It works by counting the time between successive knocks, and can be re-programmed at the touch of a button.

Of course, this system is susceptible to a replay attack, because anyone can listen to the knock pattern and then know how to get in. If you are planning to use something like this, I would recommend either incorporating a timestamp into the message, or using a series of one time knocks, in order to make it harder to break into. Actually, that might make it more secure than a regular lock.

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How much do you get paid to poop? That's the question asked by Workpoop.com, a Web site that will, helpfully, time your restroom breaks and then calculate how much money you make while on the toilet using that time, the number of times you go per week and your hourly salary. I'm torn between three feelings here: First, a childish glee; Second, a childish disappointment that I can't really participate, what with not having an hourly salary; and Third, the creeping sensation that, somewhere, somebody's boss is using this to shorten their break times.

Workpoop, your pay-per-poo calculator. Via Barfblog.

BoingBoing: We have a lot of archived articles about poop.

Image from Flickr user lilit, via CC.

My favorite podcast as of late is Erik Davis' Expanding Mind, which covers the realm of human consciousness. In previous podcasts Erik has talked with guests about neuro technologies, ceremonial magic, secret societies, underground comics, grass-roots science, hedonic circuits, and supernatural pop culture.

In the latest episode, Erik spoke with James Nestor, author of Get High Now Without Drugs : Over 175 sensory trips and tricks for visual stimulation, compressing time, lucid dreaming, mediation, and more. It's terrific fun in the vein of anther book I really like called Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit.

As Nestor told Davis, the impetus for Get High Now was a visit to his recently departed uncle's house in the Hollywood Hills. Nestor's uncle, in addition to being a wealthy eccentric bon vivant playboy, was also an avid amateur researcher of consciousness altering techniques. He had thousands of books and hand written notes on things like smoking ants (to absorb the formic acid into your bloodstream, which was recently outlawed in Dubai after kids started getting into it), hypnagogic induction, theta wave brain synchronization tapes, isolation tanks, ingesting the blood of schizophrenics, Transcendental meditation, lucid dreaming, Yucatecan trance induction beats, and so on.

Nestor (who lives in San Francisco) started practicing the safer methods with a group of friends and acquaintances dubbed HighLab. Nestor kept notes of what happened during this experiments, and these notes became the basis for his book.

Of the 175 methods in the book, the HighLab chose 15 as their favorites, including: binaural beats, clary sage bah, isolation tanks, kundalina transcendent, chanting, lucid dreaming, mud sleep induction, risset rhythm, shepard tones, Sudarshan Kriya, and thalassotherapy.

The "without drugs" part is somewhat misleading, as Nestor does mention quite a few substances such as catnip, basil, sage, puffer fish, cyanobacteria, mucana pruriens, hops, reindeer urine, and other supposedly psychoactive agents. By "drugs," he means the usual suspects: pot, LSD, cocaine, speed. These are not included in the book.

Here's the website for the book, which includes recordings of Binaural Beats, Cambiata Illusion, Chromatic Illusion, Colored Noise, Disappearing Noise, Holophonic Sound, Psuedo-Tomatis Healing Sounds, Risset Rhythm, Shepard-Risset Glissando, Shepard Tones, Theta Wave Brain Synchronization, Yucatecan Trance Induction Beats. There's also a link to an iPhone app with all the sounds and videos so you can get high while on the go.

What fun!

Expanding Mind podcast | Get High Now Without Drugs : Over 175 sensory trips and tricks for visual stimulation, compressing time, lucid dreaming, mediation, and more

From Robert Arthur's blog, Narco Polo.

An excerpt from The New Prohibition: Voices of Dissent Challenge the Drug War, the book that includes Richard Mack's story:

Ted and I were different. He smoked, he drank, at times he used marijuana, and his morals were not in line with my Mormon background. But he was a good man. He cared about his children, and he was a hard worker. He was loyal and understanding, and he had a great sense of humor .... Why were we arresting people, some really decent people, for smoking marijuana? Should we arrest all the "Teds" in the country? Take his sports car, ruin his career, give him an arrest record and some jail time, and maybe overall just teach him a lesson? (pp. 13-14)

The Narc Who Got High: What In The Heck Is The Big Deal?

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Hello everybody. I'm excited to be guest-blogging for Boing Boing for the next two weeks and I look forward to meeting some of you--many of you, I hope--through your comments. As you know, I am the author of the book "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies", which Vintage published last summer. Around the time the book came out, I started my own blog, where I have been posting fairly regularly, sometimes about other things, but mostly on the issues of the day as they pertain to cults, conspiracies and secret societies. In this season of birtherism, 9/11 Truth, death panels, sweat lodge homicides, C-Street Christians, The Lost Symbol, rogue balloons and Northwest Airline jets, I've had no lack of fodder.

I make no effort to disguise my predispositions and biases--I am respectfully agnostic on most religious issues, lean leftwards politically, and am resolutely skeptical when it comes to the paranormal or the outlandish. I hope I am not dogmatic or snide or gratuitously ad hominem, but please don't hesitate to call me out if I am. Today's entry features conspiracy theorist Orly Taitz, DDS Esq., the Moldovian-born emigrant (via Israel) to Orange County, California who has become instantly recognizable to Cable TV news viewers as "the wide-eyed queen of the so-called birther movement--that subset of individuals who still, despite all evidence, don't believe Obama was born a citizen of the United States" (Time magazine -- click here for their "2-minute bio").

On Friday, October 30, Federal District Judge David O. Carter issued a devastating 30-page ruling, dismissing Barnet et al vs Obama et al, the case Taitz had been pursuing on behalf of independent party candidates for the presidency, including Alan Keyes, as well as active duty military personnel who don't acknowledge Obama's legitimacy as Commander in Chief. The defendants included Mr. and Mrs. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Taitz responded to this latest setback to her quest to overturn the election of 2008 with a blast on her website, in which she compared herself to another victim of character assassination, Sarah Palin. As my mother might have said, she
should only be so lucky--then she could quit her triple practice of dentistry, law, and realtoring and reap millions too.

Taitz also revisited the issue of Obama's social security number(s):

There is a vicious circle that you see in a regime. There is no unbiased media. So far no one in our media had integrity of character to report on multiple social security numbers of Obama, even though it is a criminal offense, and with 39 social security numbers a person should be criminally prosecuted and should be serving a lengthy prison term. When media reports nothing, the public and the judges are misinformed. The judges are afraid to make decisions, that they think, will upset the public, and in turn, their timid and lopside decisions influence the media.

Though freepers have been buzzing about the Obama family's social security numbers since last spring, there's been nary a word about the matter in the MSM. Here's the story: Taitz hired two private detectives (former Scotland Yard Inspector Neil Sankey and Ohio Private Investigator Susan Daniels) to look into Obama's past.

According to Taitz's miscellaneous filing on October 11:

These two private investigation reports, although slightly duplicative, show beyond reasonable doubt a pattern of manipulation of Barack Hussein Obama's identity, employment, and residence information. The use of a multitude of social security numbers alone is indicative that Mr. Obama appears to have committed a substantial number of felony violations, including but not limited to violations of 42 U.S.C. §408(a) (7)(B). which shows dishonest political advantage during 2008 election. Plaintiffs submit again that "the American People Reserve the Right to know". Furthermore, the examination and decipherment of the trail of deception so casually left by this successful candidate will (1) lead ultimately to discovery of the truth about his origins and citizenship, (2) reveal the nature of the scheme to defraud by which this Mr. Barack Hussein Obama became President, and (3) show the degree and nature of the collusion of other people and parties in the scheme of defraud leading to his election, including but not limited to the other Defendants.

Daniel's affidavit attests that she discovered that Obama's social security number was issued in the state of Connecticut in the 1970s--and appeared to have been previously assigned to someone who was born in 1890 (who was deceased). Earlier Taitz had submitted a lengthy list of social security numbers associated with people named Dunham, Sutoro, and Barack Obama (also Barok, Baraq, Barake, and Barbara Obama) that Sankey had collected by running the names through Intelius, Lexis Nexis, Choice Point and other publicly accessible sites. He also claimed to have discovered that Obama's late mother had used the social security number of a woman who is alive and well and living in Washington State.

Never mind that there are other Obamas--and even other Barack Hussein Obamas--in the world, and that Internet databases are replete with errors (as are some government databases). Conspiracists have seized on these revelations as proof that Obama used the numbers to launder the ill-gotten money, obtained through drug dealing, Rezko, and Ford Foundation grants, that they believe financed his political machine. And where did he obtain them? According to at least one conspiracist web site, you needn't look far: As a volunteer at the Oahu Circuit Court Probate Department, Obama's grandmother Madeline Dunham had access to deceased people's social security numbers.

Or perhaps there was an even more sinister source. I'm thinking that the KGB agents who inserted the Kenyan-born Obama into the US as a sleeper years ago assigned him those bogus numbers precisely so that his imposture would be discovered and exposed--but not until after he was elected, precipitating the constitutional crisis that would topple the American Colossus at last. Of course they'd have to have an agent in place to expose him on schedule. And I think I know just who they used.

If Obama is a creation of the Communists, doesn't it stand to reason that the Soviet-born Taitz is their tool as well?

Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Manifesting The Mind is a forthcoming documentary about psychedelic drugs. The trailer features such heads as Dennis McKenna, Alex Grey, and Dr. Rick Strassman. When it comes to laying out a comsic rap about the magic of hallucinogens, these guys are pros. Manifesting The Mind (via Dose Nation)

The beginnings of an Aliens-style (except, you know, without all the actual bullets and killing and so forth) automatic sentry gun from diederick. The tracking platform is obviously flexible, but I think he intends to mount an AirSoft gun. Build details and code downloads are available from his website.

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It's becoming almost comical how often this happens: a new technology comes along for consuming/watching/listening/distributing some sort of entertainment content, and the industry freaks out. The technology is going to destroy the industry, and laws must be put in place, royalties must be paid, technology must be crippled, etc. And yet... the impending doomsday scenario never shows up. The player piano did not kill the sheet music market. The gramophone did not kill live concerts. The VCR did not kill the movie industry. And, here we are, with TV folks finally realizing that the DVR is not killing TV, but actually helping it. Basically, lots of people still watch ads, even if they're watching a time-delayed program. What's funny is that throughout the article you have execs insisting that this was a shock to everyone and no one could have predicted it. Except, of course, we wrote about the same basic thing three and a half years ago. But no one listens to us.

The article doesn't even mention the biggest benefit to DVRs -- even beyond the fact that people watching them still watch commercials: that it allows people to become more connected to certain shows, since they're less likely to ever miss an episode. That makes them more likely to watch those shows regularly (with or without the commercials). If someone can't keep up otherwise, they'll just let the show go entirely.

The other amusing finding in the article is that NBC's attempt to "DVR-proof" itself by moving Jay Leno to 10pm (on the theory that more people would watch it live when they couldn't fast forward through the ads) has totally backfired. That's because it also means that if people miss the show, they don't go back and watch it days later (who wants to watch stale jokes?) -- so fewer ads get watched in the long run (compared to a show that would be recorded and watched later). Oops. In the meantime, can we go back to those TV execs who were threatening to sue TiVo just a few years ago, and ask for an apology for wasting everyone's time?

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I don't know about you, but I get tired of hearing about what climate change may possibly do to our planet in 150 years. It's important stuff to know. But the emphasis on that sort of implies we're not already experiencing the fallout.

Public radio's Marketplace has put together a big series on the impacts of climate change. And, instead of reporting-as-usual, they're actually taking the time to explain what's already happened, as well as what's to come. Besides some well-reported radio stories, they've also got an interactive map that breaks the United States down into eight regions, and compares---side-by-side---that area's past (mostly based on what things were like between 1960 and 1979), present and future.

To get self-centered about it, here's what climate change has already wrought in the Midwest:

• •Frost-free season has become longer by more than a week. Again, that's just since the 60s and 70s.
• •More frequent heatwaves.
• •Two record-breaking floods within the past 15 years
• •Heavier summer and winter precipitation.
• •Increased average temperatures, especially in winter.
• •Heavy downpours are twice as frequent as a century ago.

Marketplace: The Climate Race

Panasonic-owned firm Activelink Co. built this robotic exoskeleton called a Dual Arm Power Amplification Robot. The Activelink slogan is delightedly science fiction-esque: "Creating a New Human Machine Age." According to the company, "Using Robotic Technology equipment anybody can become a superman. We are bringing this dream one step closer to reality." They should hire Sigourney Weaver as the Activelink spokesperson. More details and video after the jump.

From The Telegraph:

A team of six engineers, under Go Shirogauchi, has been working on the project since 2003 and aims to have the device, which is made of an aluminium alloy, ready to go into practical use by 2015.


"The prime use for the arm will be in disaster zones, where wheeled vehicles are unable to operate but heavy weights need to be moved," Shirogauchi said.


When completed, the arm will serve as a common platform that will have a wide range of interchangeable parts that can easily be installed. Other potential applications include in warehouses and on construction sites.

"Japanese scientists create 'Alien' bionic arm"

"For sale: One slightly-used Terminator. Still works, minor attitude problems, get it cheap now!' Several sources are reporting that the Terminator franchise is set to be auctioned off just three weeks after another well known franchise, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was sold for $60 million. The present owner, Halcyon, has filed for chapter 11 after a dispute with a hedge fund that lent Halcyon the money to buy the rights to begin with. The auction will include rights to everything but the first two films.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For sale: One slightly-used Terminator. Still works, minor attitude problems, get it cheap now!' Several sources are reporting that the Terminator franchise is set to be auctioned off just three weeks after another well known franchise, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was sold for $60 million. Present owner, Halcyon has filed for chapter 11 after a dispute with a hedge fund that lent Halcyon the money to buy the rights in the first place. The auction will include rights to everything but the first two films.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new hackerspace is opening in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY: Alpha One Labs.

Alpha One Labs hackerspace was founded in the summer of July 2009. Boasting radical inclusivity, Alpha One Labs superb design aims to provide a safe, clean space for users of all ages and interests to work on projects together. We also have weekly classes including the expected soldering and electronic projects along with some exciting additions like popsicle stick projects for kids and "ask a hacker" sessions for seniors.

They're having a grand opening fund-raising party on Friday:

Come "Light Up The Night" at our Grand Opening Fund-Raising Party. We'll have a cash prize raffle (Based on number of foursquare check ins that night. $5 per ticket, winner announced at 12am), a silent auction with various items up for bids and games such as the plug and switch race, 4 player Dreamcast and more throughout the night.

Come dressed in your wearable lights and bring lasers! We have laser controlled lights! Beer and drinks are free. $10 donation at door. RSVP.

Alpha One Labs Grand Opening Fund-Raising Party
Friday, November 6th, 8PM
65 Maspeth Ave #1A
Brooklyn, NY 11211 (Graham Ave. L)

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ubermiester writes "After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget: 'Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.' The article also notes viewership increases 'in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent when DVR ratings are added. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pretty much every single non-industry-backed study has shown this same thing, but just for the record, here's yet another study showing that those who engage in unauthorized file sharing end up buying more media. The study, looking at the UK (home of the new proposal to kick people off the internet), wasn't even close. Those who engaged in unauthorized file sharing tended to spend £77 on media per year, while those who did not spent about £44. And yet file sharers are the enemy? And the industry wants to kick them offline so they discover less new content? How will that help?

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Over at Print Magazine, BB pal Alan Rapp takes a critical look at the evolution of heavy metal design, which has (mostly) moved beyond Frazetta-inspired bikini-clad rock chix in front of the apocalpyse and candles burning on skulls. Above, album cover for designer/musician Stephen O'Malley's band Khanate. From Print:

Gone are the fantasy illustrations of radioactive zombies and band logos composed of overlapping swords. After a generation of sprouting subgenres, the heavy metal field is littered with a diversity of styles that even the most hardy metalhead will have trouble encompassing. As Ian Christe, author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and publisher of the metal-oriented press Bazillion Points says, "Heavy metal design is not a monolithic form at all. You have everything from junior high school kids in Iowa drawing skulls and pentagrams and band logos to Norwegian design houses making skulls and pentagrams and band logos. There are all levels of sophistication and intention--and execution."

Heavy metal design today comprises a vast field of images that no longer compulsively refer to adolescent power and provocation fantasies. The genre's pervading preoccupation with the occult yields far less goat and pentagram iconography--which became self-conscious clichés almost instantly anyway--than more ambiguously dark imagery. A few designers, some of the key musicians of the scene in their own right, have emerged to torque graphic conventions, and use strategies to indicate that metal, as a visual genre, is more multivalent and eloquent than mainstream design aficionados probably ever imagined.

"The Exile of Satan from Heavy Metal Design"

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "The front page of today's Stars and Stripes has a story about a privacy issue Public.Resource.Org has been working on for a couple of years:"

From 1971 to 1996, the U.S. Senate published, in the Congressional Record, the name and the full Social Security number of every military officer promoted. If the officer was senior enough, they printed their birth date as well just to make sure the wrong General Jones wasn't promoted. From 1997 until this year, they switched to only printing the last four digits of the Socials in a note to privacy. (We'll remind readers of the recent article by John Markoff in the New York Times that explained how you can usually guess the first 5 digits of a Social Security number, and since Congress provides the last four digits, you have one-stop shopping for identity theft).

Public.Resource.Org learned of this situation when we copied all Government Printing Office (GPO) docs and put them on our server. A military officer wrote to me and said we had his social on our web site. We did a full scan on our archive, and it appeared that GPO forgot to redact two years of these numbers when they went on the Internet. We called their Inspector General, and they promptly put 50 people in a room and manually scanned every single page of the Congressional Record for those two years, performing the redaction of all SSNs. Of course, we immediately redacted our copies as well.

But, after that we ran into a brick wall. On the Internet, there's a security rule: when you find a bug, you give the vendor a little time to fix it, but then you notify the public. The reason you do that is otherwise you know the bad guys will all know about the bug, but the good guys won't. So, we started calling around and sending email to get things fixed, and ran into a brick wall with the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Printing. This is the joint committee that has oversight of GPO and would be in a position to fix things. The staff of JCP totally refused to do anything. We had suggested that 3 things needed to happen:

1. All the commercial vendors that had the Congressional Record on-line should be notified so they could redact their copies. Likewise, librarians in the Federal Depository Library Program should be notified that their paper copies had problems.

2. The government should stop publishing even the last 4 digits of Social Numbers. There is just no reason to publish this in the Congressional Record.

3. The government should notify (and apologize!) to the roughly 500,000 military officers who are at heightened risk of identity theft.

To get the attention of the vendors, we drafted an Official FTC Complaint and sent it to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Defense, and then cc'd the vendors that had this data. The two major vendors quickly moved to redact. (Boing Boing readers may be amused to hear that their is no such thing as an "Official FTC Complaint," but we printed it in red and put a serial number on it and it certainly looked Official and got their attention.) But, the Joint Committee on Printing is still sitting on their hands and the Department of Defense appears oblivious. This is really unfortunate.

FTC response (PDF)

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan surveys six 'transformational' tech-panacea sales pitches that have left egg on at least some IT department faces. Billed with legendary promises, each of the six technologies — five old, one new — has earned the dubious distinction of being the hype king of its respective era, falling far short of legendary promises. Consultant greed, analyst oversight, dirty vendor tricks — 'the one thing you can count on in the land of IT is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.' Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown." What other horrible hype stories do some of our seasoned vets have?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan surveys six 'transformational' tech-panacea sales pitches that have left egg on at least some IT department faces. Billed with legendary promises, each of the six technologies — five old, one new — has earned the dubious distinction of being the hype king of its respective era, falling far short of legendary promises. Consultant greed, analyst oversight, dirty vendor tricks — 'the one thing you can count on in the land of IT is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.' Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown." What other horrible hype stories do some of our seasoned vets have?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's the '60s, and you don't have access to a semiconductor fab to make piles of cheap memory for you, so how could you store data on your computer?

Well, MAKE subscriber Steve points us to one possible solution, courtesy of vintagecalcuators.com: delay line memories. Rather than having a bunch of individual units that store a bit each, these memory devices work by storing data in sound (compression) waves. The device consists of a long length of wire, with an actuator on one end to vibrate the wire, and a reader on the other end to pick up vibrations. Because the vibrations don't travel very fast along the wire, you can make a whole bunch of them before the first one reaches the end of the wire, and that becomes the 'size' of the memory. Data can be read back by looking for a vibration at a particular time- if there is one, that corresponds to a '1', and if there isn't, it would be a '0'.

It sounds a bit weird, so I like to think of it like this. If you had a hard time remembering things for very long, and happened to live in a cave, you could just shout out what you didn't want to forget, and a few seconds later you would hear an echo to remind you. Of course, the problem with this is that an echo doesn't stick around for long, so you would have to shout again every time that you heard the echo, so that you could remember again in a few seconds. Assuming you could keep this up, you would never forget your idea. Of course, that would get really tiring after a while, so you would be much better off just writing it down.

The memory shown above is from a Monroe Epic 3000 calculator, which was apparently the first programmable calculator with a printer built in.

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Ben was the first of a few folks who sent in the story that Pepsi has been told to pay $1.26 billion (with a b) for supposedly "stealing" the idea for filtered bottled water. Seriously. Two men claim they came up with the idea in 1981 to bottle water this way and approached Pepsi distributors with the idea. They say that Pepsi "stole" their trade secrets when it launched a bottled water line, Aquafina. Of course, Aquafina was launched in the mid-nineties, a decade and a half after this conversation supposedly took place. The $1.26 billion is something of a joke as well. It's a default judgment because a Pepsi secretary apparently forgot to pass on the letter alerting them to the lawsuit, so they didn't respond. Even so... there's so much wrong with this. First, $1.26 billion? For the "idea" of filtered bottled water? And for a lawsuit filed nearly thirty years after the alleged conversation? Nearly fifteen years after the product came to market? Yeah, that makes sense...

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Hugh Pickens writes "With news organizations struggling and newsroom jobs disappearing, each week brings new calls from writers and editors who believe their employers should save themselves by charging for Internet access. However, in an interesting turnabout, the NY Times reports that Saul Friedman, a journalist for more than 50 years and a columnist for Newsday since 1996, announced last week he was quitting after Newsday decided that non-subscribers to Newsday's print edition will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge. 'My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it,' he says. Friedman, who is 80, said he would continue to write about older people for the site 'Time Goes By.' 'One of the reasons why the NY Times eventually did away with its old "paywall" was that its big name columnists started complaining that fewer and fewer people were reading them,' writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. 'Newspapers who decide to put up a paywall may find that their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "With news organizations struggling and newsroom jobs disappearing, each week brings new calls from writers and editors who believe their employers should save themselves by charging for Internet access. However, in an interesting turnabout, the NY Times reports that Saul Friedman, a journalist for more than 50 years and a columnist for Newsday since 1996, announced last week he was quitting after Newsday decided that non-subscribers to Newsday's print edition will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge. 'My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it,' he says. Friedman, who is 80, said he would continue to write about older people for the site 'Time Goes By'. 'One of the reasons why the NY Times eventually did away with its old "paywall" was that its big name columnists started complaining that fewer and fewer people were reading them,' writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. 'Newspapers who decide to put up a paywall may find that their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One unmissable snip from Rebecca Solnit's op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, which spoke to state bankruptcy here in California but is just as relevant to the USA as a whole:

Speaking of poor children reminds me of Sitting Bull, as good an authority on our economy as anyone, even if he wasn't an economist and even though he died in 1890. After the Lakota were defeated, he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for a season, but he never got ahead financially. He gave the bulk of his earnings to the street urchins who hung around the show. He was shocked that a nation powerful enough to conquer his people couldn't or wouldn't feed its own future. The white man was good at production, he concluded, but bad at distribution.

(thanks, Clayton)

WATCH: MP4 Download, YouTube, or Dotsub.

Boing Boing Video proudly presents "Man in the Sand," from Gordon Gano and the Ryans' new record "Under the Sun." Video directed by famed illustrator, photographer, and filmmaker Matt Mahurin. Read Cory's review of the album: Gordon "Violent Femmes" Gano's solo album "Under the Sun" is out!

Engadget has a recent teaser video promising HD content via XBMC running on a 600MHz Beagleboard. This could mean great things for home theater putterers, with the Beagleboard tipping the scales at a modest $150 and the ability to fit in the palm of your hand. Already running on everything from MIDs to AppleTVs and now moving to ARM-powered devices like the Beagleboard, it looks like XBMC needs to be renamed from "Xbox Media Center" to "ubiquitous media center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget has a recent teaser video promising HD content via XBMC running on a 600MHz Beagleboard. This could mean great things for home theater putterers, with the Beagleboard tipping the scales at a modest $150 and the ability to fit in the palm of your hand. Already running on everything from MIDs to AppleTVs and now moving to ARM-powered devices like the Beagleboard, it looks like XBMC need to be renamed from Xbox Media Center to ubiquitous media center.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hayley and Rachel went out this Hallowe'en dressed, respectively, as Cory Doctorow (as depicted in the XKCD webcomic) and a floppy disk. GREAT costumes, folks!

Look, it's Michael Geist! (Thanks, Rachel!)

Camera bag maker Kata has launched the 'Dream Bag Challenge' with the opportunity to win the perfect camera bag. The person submitting the best 'dream' camera bag design will win their bag, packed with $5000 worth of photographic gear including a Canon EOS 5D Mark II body + two lenses, a Gitzo tripod kit and a Metz flash. Winners of the second and third prize categories will win a Kata bag packed with gear worth $4000 and $3000 respectively. Entries close on March 1st, 2010.

Several months ago, I posted about a fascinating and fun new book titled "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more," by Arthur Goldwag. It led to a fun discussion, both in the comments thread and offline, so I was delighted when Arthur accepted my invitation to guestblog for two weeks! Welcome to the asylum, Arthur! And remember folks, just because you're paranoid, don't think They're not after you. From Arthur's bio:

After attending Kenyon College and Brown University, Arthur Goldwag worked in book publishing for more than twenty years, including stints at Random House, The New York Review of Books, and Book-of-the-Month Club. He now freelances full time.

The author of The Beliefnet Guide to Kaballah (Doubleday, 2005), Isms & Ologies (Vintage, 2007), and Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), Arthur Goldwag is also a contributing editor at Scholastic's Storyworks magazine, where he writes stories, plays, and essays for children. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two sons.

Arthur Goldwag's blog

31 years ago, in 1978, the television program 60 Minutes put on an episode about the awful threat of "video piracy" to the movie industry. Featuring the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the episode focused on how the VCR was going to destroy the movie business because anyone could copy and watch a movie in the privacy of their own home. Of course, in retrospect, that episode is hilariously wrong. You would think that, given how wrong they got it thirty years ago on this particular subject, 60 Minutes would be a bit more careful taking on the same subject again.

No such luck.

CBS's 60 Minutes has made itself out to be more of a laughingstock than usual when it comes to "investigative reporting," putting on an episode about "video piracy" that is basically 100% MPAA propaganda, without any fact checking or any attempt to challenge the (all MPAA connected) speakers, or to include anyone (anyone!) who would present a counterpoint. The episode is funny in that it contradicts itself at times (with no one noticing it) and gets important (and easily checked) facts wrong. And, of course, it basically mimics that old episode that history has shown to have been totally (laughably) false.

The report opens with the claim that counterfeit movies is where organized crime is making its money these days. Fascinating. Except they don't show any proof whatsoever that organized crime has anything to do with movie piracy at all. They just claim it, talk about Mexican gangs, and then assume it must be true. But, of course, most of the report actually focuses on the internet and file sharing of movies -- which completely goes against the claim that organized crime is "making its money" off of video piracy. After all, reports have shown that online file sharing has actually been putting DVD counterfeiters out of business. You would think that the "journalists" at 60 Minutes might have noticed this contradiction.

A big chunk of the episode is taken up by director Steven Soderbergh, who has come out in the past touting the MPAA's line before, so it's no surprise that he does so again. He claims that "piracy is costing Hollywood $6 billion a year at the box office." Does he mention that Hollywood has been making more and more and more at the box office every year the past few years? Oops. No. Did the reporters at 60 Minutes look into this fact and bring it up? Of course not. The entire story appears to be an MPAA press release, so you don't want to cloud it with pesky facts that prove they don't know what they're talking about.

Next up, Soderbergh claims that fewer movies are getting made thanks to movie piracy. Uh huh. Another checkable fact. Another one wrong. It was recently summarized, according to the movie industry's own numbers:

2004 Total Movies Released: 567 Total Combined Gross: $9,327,315,935
2005 Total Movies Released: 594 Total Combined Gross: $8,825,324,278
2006 Total Movies Released: 808 Total Combined Gross: $9,225,689,414
2007 Total Movies Released: 1022 Total Combined Gross: $9,665,661,126
2008 Total Movies Released: 1037 Total Combined Gross: $9,705,677,862
2009 Total Movies Released: 1177 Total Combined Gross: $7,596,626,766
(2009 figures incomplete, total movies scheduled to be released, gross to date)

So, actually, more than double the number of movies are being made today than just five years ago. Hmm. That's the sort of thing that a real journalist at a show like 60 Minutes might bring up to a biased director like Steven Soderberg, right? Nope.

The article mentions how to go to the movies these days, some people have to go through "airport-like security. Their bags are searched for cameras and they have to check their cell phones." Does it point out that this might be a pretty serious reason why people might not want to go to the movies? A reason why people might actually give less money to the industry? Nope. Why bother with details like that?

And then, 60 Minutes brings on our favorite industry spokesperson: Rick Cotton, NBC Universal's general counsel, the guy who warned that movie piracy put corn farmers at risk because people watching pirated movies eat less popcorn (never mind the fact that the corn industry is thriving, that people watching pirated movies still eat popcorn, and "popcorn" represents an infinitesimal part of the market...). Cotton was also the guy who thought it was a good idea to push people who wanted to watch the Olympics to pirate it rather than watch the crappy official online channel. Cotton is asked how many movies are released in the US:

"Ballpark, 400 to 500 movies are released in the United States."

Except, as we noted above, he's off by about 600 or 700 movies. Again, this is the sort of "fact" that a reporter, such as those employed by CBS and working on a television program like 60 Minutes might be expected to check, right? I would guess that most viewers of 60 Minutes expect the show's reporters and legions of other employees to do such basic fact checking. So, given that 1177 movies are going to be released in 2009, doesn't it make sense to, say, push back on Cotton's bogus number? Apparently not.

Random aside: I wonder how much money CBS makes from the big studios buying movie ads? That can't be important here, can it?

Most of the rest of the program is Soderbergh making a bunch of totally unsubstantiated statements, such as saying that no one would make The Matrix today. Why? No explanation. It's just that Sodergbergh says.

And, of course, beyond failing to fact check the most basic facts, no one at 60 Minutes thought to talk to anyone outside of the studio system to see if it made sense. It didn't talk to any one of the growing number of people who are making movies and embracing file sharing to help get those movies seen. It didn't talk to moviemakers who are embracing new business models. It didn't talk to copyright experts and consumer advocates who have shown how ridiculous the MPAA's claims are. In other words, it presented an MPAA press release as if it were news. Thirty years after it did the same exact thing and got the entire story wrong. It didn't even go back and note that earlier episode. It just repeated it with modern stand-ins.

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This tangle of corrugated plastic tubes is the Audiocloud, a collaboration between Piotr Adamski and mode:lina. It's got some high-falutin' conceptual roots, but I gotta admit I'm just charmed by the series of tubes. [via Core77]

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itwbennett writes "'Nintendo is feeling the sting of competition from the iPhone,' writes Peter Smith in a recent post. 'At least, that's the feeling one gets when reading Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's thoughts on the future of Nintendo handhelds. According to a Financial Times piece, Iwata suggests the next Nintendo handheld (and to be clear, he isn't talking about the big screen DS launching in Japan next month) might include free 3G wireless, much like the Amazon Kindle does. The challenge is to offer the immediacy of downloading an inexpensive new game, anywhere, anytime, without forcing the user into some kind of monthly data plan.' From the FT piece: 'Only people who can pay thousands of yen a month [in mobile phone subscriptions] can be iPhone customers. That doesn't fit Nintendo customers because we make amusement products,' Mr Iwata said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Overton calls this great round-up of creatively reused rolling stock from Web Urbanist a "megapost." I like that term. There's railroad-car homes, offices, hotels--even a railroad-car footbridge. [via Dude Craft]

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Another fun experiment you can try at home! Although, given pigeons' tendency to carry disease, I'd recommend training a cat, spouse or younger sibling. The video, sadly, winks out right as the expert is being brought in to explain Skinner's research. So, instead, enjoy this explanation of the pigeon experiment and its practical value, courtesy PBS:

With pigeons, he developed the ideas of "operant conditioning" and "shaping behavior." Unlike Pavlov's "classical conditioning," where an existing behavior (salivating for food) is shaped by associating it with a new stimulus (ringing of a metronome), operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behavior or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. Operant conditioning can be used to shape behavior. If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward. Skinner compared this learning with the way children learn to talk -- they are rewarded for making a sound that is sort of like a word until in fact they can say the word. Skinner believed other complicated tasks could be broken down in this way and taught. He even developed teaching machines so students could learn bit by bit, uncovering answers for an immediate "reward." They were quite popular for a while, but fell out of favor. Computer-based self-instruction uses many of the principles of Skinner's technique.

Image courtesy Flickr user foxypar4, under CC.

My hard drive has a top level, it's called Macintosh HD.

On PCs it's C:

Yahoo's home page is the root of its directory.

Suppose you were going to design a list browser for Twitter, one that would allow you to hop from list to user to their lists to other users and their lists and on and on.

Where would you begin?

There is clearly no top to this thing. Which imho is good, the same as the web. There is no Home Page, no place everyone starts. It's why the web is open and democratic and without a bottleneck and has no gatekeeper to keep you out. Hat's off to TBL for designing it that way.

That still leaves me with the problem...

Dagondanum writes "Multiple missions have been sent to Mars with the hopes of testing the surface of the planet for life — or the conditions that could create life. The question of whether life in the form of bacteria (or something even more exotic) exists on Mars is hotly debated, and still requires a resolute yes or no. Experiments done right here on Earth that simulate the conditions on Mars and their effects on terrestrial bacteria show that it is entirely possible for certain strains of bacteria to weather the harsh environment of Mars." Perhaps this is something that will be tested further in a few years by the Mars Science Lab, also known as "Curiosity" and (as reader Nova1021 points out) "the Mars Action Hero."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welcome to the third serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF thriller 7th Son: Descent (part 1, 2), a novel set in present day featuring human cloning, dangerous technologies, and "beyond Top Secret" government conspiracies .

THE STORY SO FAR: Two weeks after the bizarre murder of the U.S. president, seven strangers were torn from their "normal" lives and brought to a secret government science facility. Despite minor differences in appearance, it was clear they were the same man, with identical childhood memories.

These seven "John Michael Smiths" were unwitting participants in a human cloning experiment. Each man -- carpenter John, demented hacker Kilroy2.0, marine Michael and the others -- were brought here because their creators identified the man behind the president's assassination. It's the man they were cloned from -- the man whose childhood memories they all share -- a ruthless psychopath code-named "John Alpha."

Part 3-1, Part 3-2

Beginning with this morning's show, at 9AM Pacific...

The site is moving to wordpress.com.

The feed should continue to work, but you may find that all the posts are new again now that the guids have changed.

The feed is located here now.

http://rebootnews.com/feed/

It seems that WordPress does a redirect, automatically from rss.xml (the old location) to the new one.

The editorial system should work a lot better, and I hope more interesting discussions will evolve from each show.

Rachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, Greek, Arabic, or any one of the more than 20 official languages in India. In other words, the alphabet you're reading this blog post in will no longer be the default for web addresses.

You can watch the video here.

When Ms. Maddow's team invited me in earlier today, the first thing I did was phone Hong Kong-based journalist and global 'net culture researcher Rebecca MacKinnon (Twitter: @rmack), who was in Seoul attending the big ICANN meeting. She has written extensively on this topic, and helped me parse the news.

First up for the "non-Latin" extensions? Country-specific domain names (.cn for China, for instance). Later on, everything else (.com and the like). Don't expect to see "dot china" in Chinese characters right away, explained Rebecca: starting November 16, registrars can begin to apply, but it'll be a while before the domains show up in the wild.

Some US tech reporters covering the news ran with but what about meeee! headlines. "This is a bad day for the English language," wrote one. Well, someone call the whaambulance -- it's an awesome day if you read in Farsi or Hebrew. It's not about our language, it's about the languages spoken by the next billion people to come online, and most of them don't speak English or write in a language based on our Latin character set.

As MacKinnon reminded me from Seoul, today's announcement follows earlier news that ICANN, formed ten years ago under the auspices of the US Dept. of Commerce, will no longer answer directly to the US, but to a sort of congregation of world governments.

Many groups around the world from non-governmental organizations and civil society still have concerns about ensuring their voices are heard.

"What if a human rights group in Canada wants to register a domain name in Chinese or Arabic, in the native-alphabet country extensions for China or Saudi Arabia," she said, "Can the countries involved deny that request? Those are the sort of challenges to free speech that lie ahead."

More online:

• Web Addresses Now Can Be All Greek to You, ICANN Rules (Wired)
• Latin to lose its domain over Internet addresses (Reuters)


• At last, the web goes truly worldwide (Independent)


• Making 'net global (Arab News)
• A more connected and equal world (Independent)

Hebrew, Hindi, other scripts get Web address nod (AP)





Previously:
• Xeni on Rachel Maddow Show: John McCain vs. the Internet - Boing Boing


• Yet another reason McCain's "Internet Freedom Act" is dumb, Net ...


• Ralph Lauren's Photoshop of Horrors

When I finished my first half-marathon last month, I experienced what it felt like to run on the ground for two hours. But what is it like to run in a gravity-reduced vacuum? When AlterG offered me the chance to demo their new "anti-gravity" treadmill, I couldn't resist. I jumped in my car and headed over to the gym at UCSF, down in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. A physical therapist named Chris gave me a rubber tube to wear over my running clothes. It looked like a cross between a wetsuit, a tire, and a tutu, and it had a giant zipper going across the top. He told me to step up onto the ramp and then zipped me into the giant rubber veil that covered what otherwise looked like a pretty ordinary treadmill. The AlterG is no ordinary treadmill, though. It is a super fancy, super-expensive treadmill that isolates the lower body in a vacuum and literally takes off percentages of your body weight using technology developed by NASA. It's meant to help disabled, overweight, and injured people get a solid cardio workout without putting a strain on their limbs, but at this particular gym anybody can sign up to buy time on the machine in 30-minute increments. The AlterG uses air pressure to create the sensation of lost weight — the machine can reduce your body weight by up to 80%, making you feel like you're floating, flying, or bouncing on clouds.

By pushing arrow buttons on the treadmill screen, I was able to change my body weight percentage — air would blow into the vacuum that surrounded my legs, and the tutu-wetsuit became tighter, essentially lifting my body off the ground and making my legs float backwards into a naturally wider gait. It gave me a wedgie, and I could feel my thighs sweating from the tight seal, but none of that mattered. This was so much more fun than normal running! I ran on the AlterG for about fifteen minutes, happily romping through the clouds at a 7.5 min/mile, a near-impossible feat for the ordinary me. I felt like a gazelle.

I didn't realize just how much fun I was having in 20% gravity until my time was up. Chris deflated the air around my legs, unzipped me from the machine, and asked me to step down. As I lugged my now-impossibly heavy legs down from the treadmill ramp, I realized just how heavy I really was. My legs felt like elephants, and my spirits sunk so low that I wondered if I was suffering from a temporary depression.

So why can't all of us work out like this all the time if it's better for our bodies and more fun than real running? Maybe because the thing costs $24,500. And before the new version, the M300, was introduced last Monday, its predecessor cost $75,000. The New York Knicks and J-Lo have been known to work out on the AlterG, but it's unlikely to end up in my fitness room (what fitness room?) anytime soon. Let's not forget, our basic Bowflex costs about a grand, and we can all run for free outdoors.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A federal judge rules that government can obtain access to a person's inbox contents without any notification to the subscriber. The pros and cons of this are complicated, but the decision hinges on the assertion that ISP customers have lowered privacy interests in e-mail because they 'expose to the ISP's employees in the ordinary course of business the contents of their e-mails.' Fortunately for everybody, this is not true — most ISPs do not allow their employees to read customer e-mails 'in the ordinary course of business' — but then what are the consequences for the rest of the argument?" Read on for the rest of Bennett's analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French copyfighter Jérémie Zimmermann sez,

The negotiations on the Telecoms Package may come to a close this Wednesday. The Council of the European Union is still pushing for 'three strikes"' policies in Europe but is also attempting to allow private corporations to restrict citizens' Internet access. Will the European Parliament continue to hide behind a disputable legal argumentation provided by the rapporteur Catherine Trautmann, and accept the unacceptable for the future of Internet access in Europe?

A campaign page has been set up to allow everyone to contact Members of the European Parliament and urge them to refuse any proposal from the Council allowing "three strikes" policies in Europe, and to explicitly protect EU citizens' freedom to access the Net.

The new version of the compromise amendment presented by the Council of the EU still allows for restrictions of Internet access such as "three strikes" policies in Europe. Moreover, contrarily to the Parliament's version, the Council's proposal also permits private corporations to restrict Internet access, notably enabling entertainment industries to pressure Internet service providers in order to police the Net.

(Thanks, Jérémie!)

John Schwartz at the New York Times writes about what it's like to have a son in college whose job is to sit around with no clothes on. Hey, from the son's perspective, what's not to love, right? The only job requirement is that you have a body. Snip:

As a little boy, Sam once asked me: "Dad, is there a job where you get paid a lot and don't do much work?"

Being paid $15 an hour to sit around naked is one option. That's nearly twice as much as most other student jobs. And it's not like he's dancing at Chippendale's.

"There's a difference between nude and nakedness," says Charles Garoian, the director of the university's visual arts program. Context is vital: a stripper is naked to arouse prurient urges, while a nude model is there to unleash an artist's creativity.

In the Altogether [New York Times]

[Image: Kalim A. Bhatti for The New York Times]

I'm giving two talks in the UK this week -- the first in Cambridge, as part of the Arcadia Seminar, held at Robinson College; the second is at Sheffield, as part of the DocFest premiere of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyfighting and art that features some interviews with me. Hope to see you at them!

Cambridge: 3 November 2009, 6PM
Arcadia Seminar: 3rd Nov. "Thinking Like a Dandelion: Cory Doctorow on copyright, Creative Commons and creativity"
Umney Theatre, Robinson College, Cambridge. Please email mh569@cam.ac.uk if you are planning to attend.

Sheffield: 5 November 2009, 2:25PM-4:30PM
RiP! A Remix Manifesto
Showroom 1, Sheffield DocFest (tickets)

Update: CORRECTION -- I'm at Sheffield Doc/Fest from 1425h-1630h, not 1600-1800h as previously stated!

Weird headsets that read people's minds? It sounds like dystopian science fiction, but these gadgets (helped by a little old-fashioned muscle measurement) are set to be the holiday season's hot toys. The promised future, of mind games that lapse into punishing tension headaches, is finally upon us.

If you're old enough to remember the early 1980s, you'd be forgiven a degree of skepticism. Atari's Mindlink introduced the headband form factor and some of the tech seen in its modern counterparts, but didn't even get the chance to be a pioneering flop.

Atari Museum describes it so:

The headband would read resistance from muscles in the users forehead and interpret them into commands on the screen. ... Atari was ahead of its time with innovations such as these and given time for refinement and newer design technologies the idea of the Mindlink system would've grown into a successful peripheral.

A version of Breakout was developed, but the gaming biz hit hard times and Mindlink was canned before it went into production. Times change, however, just as technology moves on and patents lapse. By the mid-2000s, other companies developed their own mind-controlled toys, which started cropping up at trade events like the Consumer Electronics Show.

NeuroSky is most prominent of the newcomers, scoring licensing deals with Sega Toys and Square Enix. I got brains-on with a prototype for Wired:

The prototype headgear is hacked into pairs of headphones, and measures baseline brainwave activity, said to provide an insight into states of relaxation and anxiety ... Liu continually tells me to remain calm, to calm my thoughts, to think of calm, but all I want to do is crush enemies with desks.

It's hard to describe the experience. I was able to maintain a high level of whatever it actually measured but it didn't seem to be calmness. ...

"It's like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had," Liu said.

Neurosky plans educational gear to help attention-deficit youngsters learn focus, but gaming is where the hype is. It's not the only company aiming to develop brainwave toys, either: Hitachi has a brain-controlled model railroad in its lab, and Emotiv has partnered with Intel as it works on its own rig--its design has 14 electrodes to NeuroSky's one, but remains a specialist product. There's also Mindball, a $20,000 table game built on similar principles.

Now, how about those toys? Here's what you can buy, right now.

Star Wars Force Trainer

Uncle Milton's $80 Force Trainer "fulfills a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Lucasfilm's Howard Roffman. The aim of the game: concentrate hard enough for a ball to rise to the top of a perspex tube. Star Wars sound effects indicate the state of play, and add licensed flavor.

<a href="Force Trainer [Amazon]

Mind Flex

Also from Mattel and NeuroSky, Mind Flex is a more involved and challenging affair: train your thoughts to increase power to a fan which blows a ball through a course of hoops. Yes, I know, it's hardly Akira.

Mindflex Game [Amazon]

Neural Impulse Actuator

Computer equipment house OCZ makes the "brain mouse" that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) readings of brain waves and eye movements to push its pointer. It's PC-compatible, and usable as a generic game controller as a result, but don't throw out your Logitech just yet: it doesn't offer multiple axes of movement.

MindSet

NeuroSky's own standalone brain-measurer is twice the price of OCZ's, but looks comfier and is bundled with fun extras. Built into a set of BlueTooth headphones, it comes with a package of games and brainwave visualizing software.

The included Adventures of Neuroboy, for example, offers various scenarios requiring the use of telekinetic powers to progress. Back-of-the-box bullet points include "Throw benches around" and "Set cars on fire."

Also in development is a title from top developer Square Enix, announced late last year. A dev-kit is included for programmers.

Now, it's easy to be down on this stuff: however cool consumer-affordable EEG visualization is, it's pretty primitive as gaming goes. The same single axis of control, as offered by the original Mindlink in the 1980s, is the core feature. But there's something fascinating about how the new stuff echoes the old, right down to the use of elaborate marketing to imbue crude technology with whatever can be drawn from the player's imagination.

Take Breakout, that classic single-axis game. It was, you may recall, the story of a determined astronaut's harrowing return to Earth.

Either that, or it was a ball, a wall, and a bat.

It's beginning to look like German Chancellor Angela Merkel believes the entire point of copyright is not to provide incentive to create, but as a way to hurt Google and protect obsolete local businesses. Last month, we wrote about her complaints concerning the Google book project (where she conveniently left out the fact she had tried to fund the European equivalent). And, now, her party has proposed created a special new copyright law just for old school news organizations. There aren't many specifics, other than they want to protect news organizations, and this odd claim:

"The Internet cannot be a copyright-free zone."

The thing is, it's not a "copyright-free" zone. But what the internet has shown is that if you put in place dumb copyright laws that do no more than to prop up business models, people will route around them. That's even more likely to occur if Merkel and her colleagues create a special "protect newspapers" copyright.

The article suggests that the likely proposal would involve "neighboring rights," which are found in some other areas of copyright law -- and would require that the original creator of the content give some kind of permission before any commercial use of the work. So, in theory, any "commercial" aggregator could only aggregate and link to stories from which it has received explicit permission. In other words, it would effectively break the basic premise of the web by not allowing you to summarize and link where you would like.

Not surprisingly, newspaper and magazine publishers in Germany are all for it, though they might want to think twice about that. Just wait until one of their competitors breaks a story, and they're unable to talk about it without "permission." Meanwhile, plenty of people who actually have put some thought into this realize that the "commercial/non-commercial" line is not clear at all. Is a personal blogger who puts up some basic ads on his or her site (even if they earn pennies) a "commercial enterprise"? And what about Google News, which doesn't have ads on the European version of Google News (it only recently put ads on the US version)?

On the whole, this sounds like someone decided they wanted to "help out" the major media companies, but without anyone putting much thought into the actual details or inevitable consequences of such a law. A more cynical person might suggest that this proposal is really designed to gain the current ruling party a bit of support from the mainstream press in Germany...

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

In need of a more visible level for setting up long exposure night shots, zomie made an LED illuminated level attachment for use with his DSLR + Gorillapod setup. Check out his instructable for the step-by-step.

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A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more CDs, buy more botlegs of live shows, buy more t-shirts, talk about music more, do more downloading -- all of it.

And of course, these are the people the music industry's supergeniuses have set their sights upon for bizarre enforcement regimes like the one that British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has promised: anyone who lives in a house that generates three or more copyright infringement notices will be barred from Internet access.

"The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access," said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.

However, music industry figures insist the figures offer a skewed picture. The poll suggested the Government's plan to disconnect illegal downloaders if they ignore official warning letters could deter people from internet piracy, with 61 per cent of illegal downloaders surveyed admitting they would be put off downloading music illegally by the threat of having their internet service cut off for a month.

"The people who file-share are the ones who are interested in music," said Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research. "They use file-sharing as a discovery mechanism. We have a generation of young people who don't have any concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he continued. "You need to have it at a price point you won't notice."

Illegal downloaders 'spend the most on music', says poll (Thanks, Libbi!)

Penfold sez, "As a student of medicine and biomedical engineering, I enjoy the chance to make something a little creepy for Hallowe'en. The link shows a homemade anatomically correct latex-moulded mask of the musculature of the human face, as well as an unhappy pumpkin with an exposed brain. Feliz dia de los muertos!"

Hallowe'en 2009 (Thanks, Penfold!)

Two years ago, I blogged Flickr users andibob909's steampunk wedding and now they're about to have a baby! I learned this by admiring the awesome Darth-Vader-and-Death-Star pregosaur costume. That is one lucky foetus and one awesome mom-to-be!

Darth Vader and the Death Star

Sarah sez, "This Halloween my costume was inspired by Longoland's Monster Skin Rug (which I think is just so awesome). I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing some pics -- I called it the Longo Monster and got 3rd place for "Scariest Costume" at the 13th Annual North Halsted Halloween Parade here in Chicago. I spent the whole night getting hugged by strangers who thought it was adorable :) The body is a mechanic's jumpsuit covered in scales cut from white fleece."

Longo Monster -- costume inspired by Longoland rug (Thanks, Sarah!)

James sez, "I just completed a working build of Donald Michie's MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), an early (1960) example of machine learning. MENACE uses 304 matchboxes to play Noughts and Crosses (or Tic Tac Toe in the US) - and learns over time to play it better. I built it for a talk at the UK games conference Playful, about Awesomeness and Miracles, particularly focussing on the work of Charles Babbage - and culminating in a surprisingly large version for playing Go..."

MENACE is a machine that plays noughts and crosses, built out of 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox corresponds to one of the 304 board layouts that the opening player might face (there are actually 19,683 possible board layouts, but we only need to calculate the opening player's first four moves, and many are rotationally or reflectively identical). In turn, each matchbox contains a number of glass beads corresponding to each possible next move. When it is MENACE's turn to play, the operator simply selects the matchbox corresponding to the current state of play, shakes it, and opens it to see which move has been chosen. Each matchbox contains a small nook into which one bead falls--and MENACE plays in the square corresponding to that bead.

But what's really clever is that MENACE learns. Every time it wins a game, an additional bead is added to each matchbox played, corresponding to each winning move. Likewise, every time it loses, a bead corresponding to each losing move is removed. As a result, over time, MENACE becomes more likely to play moves that have previously resulted in wins and less likely to play moves that have resulted in losses.

A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES Being NOTES and SLIDES on a talk given at PLAYFUL 09, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE

MENACE Flickr set

"MAKE ME A REASONABLE OFFER AND LET'S MAKE A DEAL!," says the seller on Etsy. Looks like that means about a thousand bucks. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

rysiek writes "Seems like there might be a revolution in the works, as far as VoIP software for Linux is concerned. After mailing Skype support about Skype providing Mandriva RPM packages, Olivier Faurax got an answer which suggests that the Linux Skype client will be open-sourced. After asking for verification of whether that was the case, the tech support answer claimed it is going to happen, and that it's supposed to happen 'in the nearest future.' Now, this probably only means the client (the underlying protocol will probably be handled by a binary-only library), but even if that's the case, it seems like there is still reason to celebrate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In which I am inspired by a snarky comment on another blog.

My normal routine involves a fair amount of procrastination, but I tell myself that's OK (really), because sometimes it leads to work ideas. Like, a couple of months ago, when I was browsing through the Onion AV Club and stumbled over the headline, "By 2100 Everyone Will Be Part Duggar."

Naturally, my response was to wonder whether that might actually be true. After all, back in 2003, researchers figured out that 8 percent of all men living in central and east Asia--a huge proportion of the global population--are likely descendants of Mongol ruler/horde-leader Genghis Khan. I contacted some of the researchers involved in that project to find out whether we can project that kind of genetic impact forward in time as well.

Image courtesy TLC.

The answer: Kinda-sorta.

"It's really just a little simple math," said Spencer Wells, Ph.D., Explorer-in-Residence with the National Geographic Society, working on their Genographic Project, which traces human migration patterns by studying DNA markers. "If you imagine that each of the Duggars' 19 kids has 19 kids, for only four generations--that's only going for 100 years--there would be 130,000 descendants of this one couple."

But, at the same time, it's not as easy as all that. Wells, and colleague Chris Tyler-Smith, Ph.D.,head of the Human Evolution team at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said it's too early to tell what the Duggars' genetic impact on America will be.

Let's look back at Khan again. And clarify things a bit, while we're at it. It's important to point out that nobody knows for certain that 8 percent of Asian men are descendants of the Mongol leader. What we know is that those men share a collection of genetic mutations--a haplotype--on the Y chromosome, which suggests that they all shared a common male ancestor.
Y chromosomes are passed from father to son intact, without the shake-n-bake interference of maternal DNA. So Y chromosomes don't get remixed each generation, but they do, occasionally, pick up a small change here and there from random mutation. Scientists know roughly how often those mutations happen, so they can look at a haplotype, see how different it is from the general population, and get an idea of when that family group broke off from the herd. In this case, the point of origination would have been about 1000 years ago, give or take.

Scientists associate the haplotype with Genghis Khan not because all the men who share it have a predilection for little furry hats, but because of simple logical deduction. It's a rare guy who is going to have enough children, and whose children will have enough children (and etc.) to leave such a big mark on such a large geographic area. Historically, we know that around 800 years ago, old Genghis was doing quite a bit of marrying, concubining and raping/pillaging. And we know that his immediate descendants were also powerful men who were able to have a lot of children, with a lot of different women, in a lot of different places. Chris Tyler-Smith explains it thusly,

"So we can either say that there were two separate events: One, Genghis Khan's lineage, which was present in Mongolia 800 years ago and we know was greatly amplified over the next centuries, has disappeared from the current gene pool, while another lineage that arose in the same place around the same time has reached high frequency without leaving any trace in history. Or we can say that Genghis Khan's lineage and the star cluster lineage were the same. To me, this second possibility is the simpler explanation. Indirect, but a bit more than guesswork."

To tie this whole Mongolian warlord thing back to the Duggars, just look at the kids. Genghis' sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons were privileged by his power and wealth. They had the means to support BIG families, and the social capital to acquire those families. In fact, they had the social obligation to breed it up. And, thus, did the not-exactly-meek-and-peaceful Khan inherit most of Asia.

Whether the scientists of 2800 are studying the Duggar haplotype depends on how many babies the 19 Duggar kids, and their kids, have. In this case, it's not necessarily a given that the parents' productivity will be inherited. If growing up in America's biggest TV family leaves most of the kids gun-shy, so to speak, the family could end up with no more of a long-term genetic footprint than the rest of us. On the other hand, there are certainly social and religious factors encouraging the Duggarlets to follow in their parents' footsteps. And, if a large number of them do, and if their kids carry on the family tradition...we could well be on the way to welcoming our Duggar overlords. Genetically speaking.

Side note: In writing this, I kept having to re-check to proper spelling of "Duggar" in the singular, because it looked weird. Because you never see the name in that form.

Mr Pink Eyes writes with news about comments from US Attorney General Eric Holder, who said a San Francisco lawsuit over warrantless wiretapping should be thrown out, since going forward would compromise "ongoing intelligence activities." From the AP report: "In making the argument, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration's position on the case but insists it came to the decision differently. A civil liberties group criticized the move Friday as a retreat from promises President Barack Obama made as a candidate. Holder's effort to stop the lawsuit marks the first time the administration has tried to invoke the state secrets privilege under a new policy it launched last month designed to make such a legal argument more difficult. ... Holder said US District Judge Vaughn Walker, who is handling the case, was given a classified description of why the case must be dismissed so that the court can 'conduct its own independent assessment of our claim.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week's story on Escape Pod, the excellent weekly science fiction short story podcast was "Infestation" by Garth Nix. It's a vampire story with a twist (in a genre where not many twists are left) and it kept me guessing right up to the end. A delightful piece of speculative and wicked science fiction.

They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to assault the south covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood. face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not

They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death® low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops.

Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.

EP222: Infestation

MP3 link

Subscribe to Escape Pod podast feed

Bank Notes is a site that reproduces the text of demand notes used in "successful and unsuccessful unarmed bank robberies," along with a photo of the robber who penned it:

I have a gun in my bag.
Give me $5,000 please.
Thanks a bunch.

male, 20, Metro Bank, Wyomissing Hills, PA

Bank Notes: a collection of Bank Robbery Notes (via MeFi)

Politicians almost always push for stronger copyright laws or copyright law enforcement -- and yet, time and time and time again we see that when it comes to their own use, they often violate copyright law themselves. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt: most people who don't pay attention closely simply buy the industry's line about copyright: that it's property and that it's important to keep the industry functioning. Neither is true, of course, but if you don't think about it or pay attention to how copyright really works, you can see how people would believe that.

So here we are again, with yet another politician -- this time US Attorney and current New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie -- caught red handed making use of content he most likely had no permission to use. In this case, he used clips from old Monty Python skits in his television commercials (which were also placed online). The chaps who make up Monty Python insist that Christie had no permission to do so and they don't like it (they're considering suing). Now, I tend to think that using a clip in such a manner should be perfectly legal, but given that it is not, it does look pretty bad for a long-term lawyer, current US Attorney and now candidate for governor to be caught flat-out ignoring copyright law.

One could hope that this would be a "teachable moment" to a politician, letting him know that copyright is an issue that isn't quite as clear cut as many politicians make it out to be. And yet, somehow, I doubt that will happen. It's not yet clear if Christie has much of a record on copyright issues (I can't find much), but somehow I doubt he'll suddenly become a fair use crusader.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Augustson designed etched and assembled a specialized Arduino board for a new robotics project -

What is ADM 1.0? Basically we built an Arduino, added a Dual Motor Controller to it and a small prototyping area. Hence the name ADM (Arduino Dual Motor).  The board works and is programmed just like a normal Arduino. For the science fair, part of the rules stated we could not use an actual Arduino board, but were able to build or modify our own.

Check out the ADM-Robot part 1 page for printable PCB art and more infos.

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Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that?

That's at least part of the purpose of the whole push to "realtime" stuff. I've been writing about it since 1997, I called it Just-In-Time Search. Similar ideas, but not exactly.

When you search for friends you always get the same old pictures, because the search engine reports them in order of relevance. Perhaps there are newer pictures, but they're nowhere near the top, and it might not even consider them relevant enough to index.

We need a search engine whose primary axis is currency, that values news and images based on their newness, not by how many others are pointing to it. Google has News Alerts, but that's it. Their news system is geared toward big stories. I'm interested in the small stuff their search engine covers. There's news there too.

Update: A commenter says that Google does have time-based search. I'll check it out.

JoshuaInNippon writes "The 10,000 km (6,200 mile) long Unity fiber optic cable, funded by Google and five East Asian communication companies, left Japanese shores on November 1st to be laid along the northern Pacific Ocean floor. The Japanese end of the cable is expected to be fused to the American end sometime around November 11th. The cable, which was announced in February of 2008 at a cost of around $300 million USD, has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use. When Unity begins full operation sometime early next year, it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter red weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Personally, I think 99 red balloons would've been better, for marketing purposes, than 10. I guess that would take way too long. [via Hack a Day]

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One of the reasons why the NY Times eventually did away with its old "paywall" was that its big name columnists started complaining that fewer and fewer people were reading them. We've suggested in the past that newspapers who decide to put up a paywall may find that their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement. So, with Cablevision deciding to put Newday behind a paywall, it didn't take long for some of its columnists to start to bailing. The NY Times is reporting that Newsday columnist Saul Friedman quit and did so while publishing an open letter on why paywalls are a bad idea, while also telling the NY Times that he knew his column was popular with people outside of Newsday's footprint, and he was upset that those people would not be able to read his column and that he wouldn't be able to send out links to his columns.

Oh, one other thing? Mr. Friedman is 80 years old and worked for newspapers for over 50 years. In other words, he's not just some "young kid who thinks everything online should be free" as we're so often told is the real problem. News organizations that lock up their content are increasingly going to discover that it's more and more difficult to attract top talent when compared to publications that actually help raise the journalists' profiles.

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Carl Zeiss has launched the Distagon T* 2/35 ZE wide-angle lens in Canon EF mount, for both analog and digital EOS SLRs. This manual focus lens, with its large f2 aperture, is made up of 9 elements in 7 groups. Previously available in ZF (Nikon), ZK (Pentax) and ZS (M42 screw mount), the ZE mount version will start shipping from November 16 for a retail price of US $870.

Android hacker Akia Harada has successfully ported the latest version of Android to the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream. It's an early build that needs optimization, but it does boot and gives those brave enough to install it a glimpse of the new Android 2.0 operating system. [via AndroidGuys]

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ruphus13 writes "In a sign that ebooks are rising in popularity, a recent survey by mobile analytics company Flurry revealed that users may be using the iPhone for more intellectual pursuits, and not just the visual sizzle. The 'book-related' apps on the iPhone overtook games in terms of new apps released. According to the post, 'Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September ... So much so, that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn't an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book...Because from August 2008 to the same month in 2009, more apps were released in the 'games' category than any other and, as a result, the iPhone (and iPod touch) became a new handheld gaming platform, one that impacted Nintendo DS. '"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave W alerts us to a story in the UK of how (allegedly) 11 city council members in a small rural town resigned from the council after getting annoyed by a local blogger criticizing them. Dave notes that the blog in question isn't too bad, but also notes that such city councils are often staffed by people who do the job because no one else wants to do it. Still, if you're going to hold some sort of public office, at some point you would think that you would learn how to take some criticism. It makes me wonder if there's really more to this story beyond just a critical blogger and thin-skinned council members.

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The Tentacle-box is a mobile DJ station housed inside an old freestanding Philips radio. The music is from a car stereo hooked to a 12-volt batter jumper, and an Arduino multiplexes the lights. Check out the link for more information, and the Arduino source code.

It should be able to work without being connected to an outlet. It should have lights and it shouldn't be to heavy to move around. Ateast not by a small wagon. And it should be loud. Not Mötorhead loud but loud enough. It should also be cheap enough so that I would not cry if it got trashed or stolen after a few gigs/parties.

In the Maker Shed:


In the Maker Shed: Arduino Duemilanove

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Really sweet Mario costume with built-in classic sound-effects from Adafruit forum member djmacatack. It uses an Arduino with an Adafruit WaveShield. [Thanks, Becky!]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PDT, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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teko_teko writes "Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota's Prius plant in Toyota City, Japan. The sage derivative's leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia's leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling, in turn producing less carbon dioxide (CO2)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris sez, "I made a thing! This thing did not exist before I decided to make it. John Young called out to me from his universe, 'Make me a Ban Hammer!' So after a little 3D modeling and research, I conjured into existence the worlds only real Ban Hammer. If you are so able and inclined, you can print your own with the instructions given here."

Sisters and brothers, these are the first days of a new golden age of kipple.

Ban Hammer: 3D printed (Thanks, Chris!)

An IBM sings Daily Bell in 1961. Fails to descend into madness. More! [YouTube]

coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter Johansson is building a professional-grade medium-format camera. Like, from scratch. He's about 80% done and has done a wonderful job documenting the build. [Thanks, Billy!]

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daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, the estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorized a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. 'Isaac Asimov died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here,' writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, the estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorised a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. 'Isaac Asimoc died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here,' writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.