ceswiedler writes "In Tuesday's election voters in Takoma Park, MD used a new cryptographic voting system designed by David Chaum with researchers from several universities including MIT and the University of Maryland. Voters use a special ink to mark their ballots, which reveals three-digit codes which they can later check against a website to verify their vote was tallied. Additionally, anyone can download election data from a Subversion repository and verify the overall accuracy of the results without seeing the actual choices of any individual voter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have a problem with entrepreneurs who say they want to Change The World.

Isn't that a lot to take on? How do you know your idea for changing the world is what the world needs? What if you Change The World and instead of making it better you make it suck. What then?

I am a former young person who wanted to Change The World himself. I look back at that young person, and think -- he was lovely in many ways but he made a pretty good mess of his life, because he had no clue who he was and how he got that way. Change The World? Good thing that didn't happen!

As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions. Yet my father would always give a couple of bucks to anyone who asked for it. And if you wanted to take a picture of him, no matter how old or sick he got, he always put on a smile and let you take it, and if you asked why, he shrugged it off, as if there was any reason to care. A week before he died, I tried to teach him to use Twitter, but he said he didn't have time. He was right.

So I've recently seen the end. I don't think too many people get much further than my dad did. He lived to be 80, grew up in Europe, fled from a war, fought in a war, raised a family, was married 55 years, got an education, taught, went to museums and the ballet and opera, traveled everywhere, and I don't think he would have said, at the end, he had any idea how to Change The World. It's only youth that figures it knows, but that's because of strong chemicals and not knowing what you don't know. It's an illusion.

Change is made by all of us, over many generations. The best we can do is make a few other people happy for a while, make ourselves happy, and if you do that, and leave the place a little nicer for having been here, I say -- Job Well Done!

Maybe instead of changing the world, relax, and Let The World Change You. That's closer to what actually happens in life, no matter how rich or famous (or not) you are.

See also: Transcendental Money.

Earlier this year, we had a discussion on the changing nature of sports beat reporting in the internet era, and one of the points we made is that there really is an awful lot of overlap and duplication in effort in some cases (such as the NY media). And yet, as pointed out by Jay Rosen old school baseball reporter Murray Chass is complaining that about half of the newspapers that have baseball beat writers did not sent a reporter to the World Series this year, calling it a "sign of a dying industry." Apparently there are 60 newspapers in America that have beat reporters who travel with the teams they cover, but only 31 of those papers sent reporters to the World Series.

I'm really searching to see how this is a problem. First of all, those 29 other papers are all papers whose local teams are not in the World Series, meaning less interest. Second, those beat reporters are equally capable of watching the games on TV from the comfort of their own home and getting their quotes from the televised press conferences afterwards. It's not as if a player on the Yankees is going to break an important story to the Braves beat reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. All they'd really be doing is adding to the media scrum around the players before and after each game, adding absolutely nothing of value. On top of that, the count of papers also leaves out the national media reporters -- such as those from ESPN and Sports Illustrated -- as well as the the reporters employed by MLB.com. I'd argue that the fact that about half of the papers decided not to send their own beat reporters is a sign of (finally) smarter newspaper management in not wasting money on a boondoggle for a baseball reporter.

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Our dear friend and guest blogger alum Richard Metzger (show here with his wife Tara in a photo that Coop took) is now in charge of the This Is Brand X blog. Brand X is the Los Angeles Times' entrant into the "alt weekly" market, edited by Deborah Vankin. There are over 100,000 copies in distribution boxes around town.

Richard is the most knowledgeable and most interesting cultural critic I know. The LA Times scored a major coup when they signed him on.

From the press release:

Richard comes to Brand X with a decorated background, most notably as one of the New York Post's "top 20 most important new media executives" and having also been named one of the "top 100 people on the Internet" (twice!) by Silicon Alley Reporter. He's a Webby-award winner and was recently given the "New Business Award" by the Tribeca Film Festival for co-founding The Disinformation Company Ltd., a New York-based book publisher and DVD distributor, where he served as the company's creative director for 11 years.

This is Brand X

@Whiteafrican compiled this neat Twitter List of Africa tech folks: mostly people from Africa or working in Africa, doing interesting things with technology on that continent.

"Oilpunks" and MAKE pals Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate have struck (hammer to anvil) again and come up with the Electrobyte, a cross between an extinct marine arthropod and a wheel chair. Flush from the success of their amazing Golden Mean snail car, they decided to do a sort of mini-me companion vehicle. They took the power and drive systems from an old electric wheelchair and created a hand-tooled trilobite body to go on top of it. The result is this sweet little ride.

Test-driving the Electrobite, a trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle

More:
Make your own snail art car
Snail car

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About 75% of Americans eligible as military recruits couldn't serve if they wanted to: they're too obese, intellectually challenged, diseased, or they're stoners. [Wired Danger Room]

remolacha writes "I've been given the task of tech chief for a biggish art museum (1300 m2, or about 13,000 sq ft) in Spain. The museum's designers want 20 'terminals' that will offer on-demand video and interactive content. the terminals' content will change with the exhibits; many will have touchscreens. More interesting forms of input are planned as well (floor sensors, big buttons). It's all on one floor, and the floors are raised, so I can run cabling and set up floor ethernet jacks. Max cable run is 60m / 190ft. The museum may expand to 4 times its projected size once open, by comandeering other floors in the building. To give an idea of where the designers heads are, they were talking about a massive dvd changer in a closet somewhere. I am thinking an intranet running a webserver with a CMS and flash media server, terminals running firefox in kiosk mode. I'd love to do everything on Linux. Does anyone have experience with a setup like this, better ideas, or advice?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dear god, the overlords have arrived. I found that terrifying (but work-safe) photo through Graham Linehan on Twitter, who muses: "Imagine the fuss if this was in the shape of Jesus instead of a wonky bug-eyed tenting alien."

Edmund Wilson's all-purpose bugger-off reply. (Via Tim Ferriss)

I love this commercial for a mobile home liquidator produced by I Love Local Commercials, a couple of guys who travel around the country making free commercials for independent businesses.

Video of exploding capacitors shot at 300 frames per second. The real fun starts at around 2:30.

MAKE: Exploding capacitors in high speed

Evelyn Border (above) and Tina Griekspoor of Bedford County, PA got some old-timey style public shaming for stealing gift cards that a child misplaced in a store.

"I'm just standing out here being humiliated in front of people," Griekspoor said.

"I admit we did make a mistake," said her mother, across the street.

Both agreed to the penance to avoid jail time for theft of lost property.

Thieves must proclaim their deed

I dig this Periodic Table Table that appeared on MAKE. One commenter there says he thinks it's from the Wake Forest University campus in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Great idea for a... science park. (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Last year, we wrote about Grammy award wining singer Joss Stone and her opinions on file sharing where she said she "loves it" and thinks "it's brilliant." More recently, Stone was asked about her EMI labelmate Lily Allen's recent misguided attack on file sharing (even as she, with the help of EMI, was file sharing a ton of tracks). Stone's response, as noted at Freakbits, is basically that musicians who are good have nothing to fear, but she could see why musicians who aren't very good (apparently, she means Ms. Allen) do have reason to fear:

"She [Lily Allen] needs to sell records because she's not a singer, and that's not an offense to her because I think that she knows that too," says Stone.

"...when musicians are really making real music people come to the show and that's what we make our money from, from playing live. And I think it's probably harder for an artist like Lily and many other pop acts. It's really about the track and about their personality and their celebrity and that's how they make their money is selling those records."

Stone says that Lily cannot win a fight against music piracy, and for that matter, neither can anyone else.

"So let's just accept it and let's see it as something that can be beautiful and it might change music for the better," she says pragmatically. "It might sort the weeds from the flowers."

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m2pc writes "PayPal has just announced the availability of their Open API under the 'PayPal X Program.' This enables developers to integrate PayPal payment processing services without forcing users to redirect to PayPal's website to enter payment information. This new initiative is designed to allow the company to better compete with the likes of Google and Amazon, which offer similar services. I wonder how much they paid for their domain: x.com?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love this reuse of an first-gen "sunflower" G4 iMac (aka the "Luxo"). It was also nicknamed the iLamp (due to its flexible desk lamp-like arm), so this builder went ahead and turned his into an actual lamp.

How to Recycle an iMac Luxo

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Kiwi businessman Wayne Eyre dropped a pretty penny on this fantasy home theater build, but the results are impressive. Many have suggested that it's supposed to be Captain Nemo's Nautilus, but there's no mention of deliberate Verne overtones in the original article. The last photograph above, for instance, shows leaking "plutonium torpedoes" in part of the installation, but plutonium wasn't even discovered until 50 years after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was published. [via Dude Craft]

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“[Jelte] Van Abbema created the font by stamping bacteria into paper, and then placing the paper in a jury-rigged incubator, which provided the right humdity and warmth for the organisms. As they multiplied and died, the resulting fonts changed color and shape.” (via)

cananian writes "The webbook company of Gnome's own Havoc Pennington (with a healthy dose of ex-Nokia and ex-OLPC engineers) finally shed its secrecy today, with a new web site and an article in the WSJ. Technical specs on the hardware were found by Engadget last week, and now comes a bit more information on the software behind the UI. Most of the client software is written in JavaScript with GTK/Clutter bindings, and the UI has some superficial similarities to Pentagram's designs for OLPC's Sugar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Need a reminder to hook your capacitors up correctly? Try watching this video by Dave of EEVblog, exploding capacitors in high speed. Taking advantage of his new high speed camera, he filmed the thermal breakdown caused by reverse biasing on a number of different types of polarized capacitors. Neat effect,, but certainly not something I would want to happen next to a freshly designed circuit board.

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A few years ago, we noticed the troubling trend of private equity firms raising capital solely for the purpose of investing in patent lawsuits. Basically, these private equity guys saw the ridiculous awards being handed out to patent holders who did nothing, and realized they wanted in on the game. So they raised funds of hundreds of millions of dollars, and basically approached different small patent holders, examined their patents, and basically promised to bankroll lawsuits against companies who actually did stuff, in exchange for a cut of the winnings. One of the biggest players in this space (perhaps the largest outside of Intellectual Ventures) is Altitude Capital Partners.

Joe Mullin has uncovered some of the details of how Altitude works (and how some of these lawsuits work), because Altitude is upset with the amount of money it got back from one of the patent holders whose lawsuit it "invested" in. Note, here, that it does not appear that Altitude invested in the company in question, DeepNines, but specifically in the lawsuit. Altitude gave DeepNines $8 million for its lawsuit in the structure of a loan. DeepNines sued security firm McAfee and worked out an eventual $25 million settlement. How much did DeepNines actually get? Less than $800,000 -- and even that's in dispute.

Basically, because Altitude had a "model" of what it felt DeepNines should get in a lawsuit, and that model popped out a $200 million award, it felt that it didn't get enough. But the breakdown suggests it did fine. DeepNines paid back the loan at a 10% interest clip, plus another $700,000 as its "contingency fee" on the winnings, adding up to $10.1 million. Then DeepNines ended up having to pay its lawyers at Fish & Richardson over $11 million in fees, plus another $1.25 million to local lawyer (and former federal judge) Robert Parker. DeepNines also had to pay additional expenses for travel and other legal costs, adding up to another $2.1 million. In the end, it was left with less than $800,000. Doesn't seem quite worth the effort.

Especially since Altitude is demanding another $5.3 million, saying that DeepNines should have calculated its contingency fee based on the overall award, not after subtracting legal fees. Of course, if it did that, then DeepNines -- despite having "won" $25 million, will have lost nearly $5 million on the overall deal. Be careful who you partner with. This should be a huge warning to any patent holders who think about accepting money from a firm like Altitude. Even a $25 million "win" can turn into a huge loss, if you're not careful.

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clang_jangle writes with this excerpt from The Inquirer outlining Comcast's new traffic-throttling scheme, based on information from Comcast's latest FCC filing. "Its network throttling implements a two-tier packet queueing system at the routers, driven by two trigger conditions. Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes. Its second traffic throttling trigger is tripped when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to – along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers – gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible. Tripping either of Comcast's high bandwidth usage rate triggers results in throttling for at least 15 minutes, or until your average bandwidth utilisation rate drops below 50 per cent for 15 minutes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Lowry built this sweet WoW magic-user costume for his son. It has LED health and mana bars, LED magic power in the gloves, and an LED, er, "touch-sensitive fairy companion." There's one Arduino for the gloves and status bars, and another for the companion.

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CWmike writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against microprocessor maker Intel, alleging that the company engaged in a 'systematic campaign' of illegal conduct to protect a monopoly. Cuomo's lawsuit alleges that Intel extracted exclusive agreements from large computer makers and threatened to punish those perceived to be working too closely with Intel competitors. Intel gave computer makers payments totaling billions of dollars in exchange for the exclusive agreements, and the company threatened to cut off payments to computer makers or fund their competitors when they worked with other microprocessor makers, the lawsuit alleged. Cuomo's lawsuit comes less than two weeks after news reports that the FTC is considering filing a formal complaint against Intel. 'Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,' Cuomo said in a statement. 'Intel's actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Lord Mandelson officially announced his plan to kick file sharers off the internet based on accusations (not convictions) -- the so-called "three strikes" plan -- I asked a simple question: how will this get people to buy more. It was fun watching industry defenders paint themselves into corners trying to explain it, but they couldn't. The best they could say is that the fear of losing an internet connection would get them to stop file sharing. But, of course, getting them to stop file sharing is a lot different than actually getting them to buy something.

And, on top of that, we already have empirical evidence that a fear-based campaign doesn't make people buy any more. Over at The Telegraph in the UK (where I'll now be writing a semi-regular column) I explore how the industry already tried a fear-based campaign when they threatened and/or sued tens of thousands of individuals for file sharing. Even the industry's most strident defenders, who support taking away people's internet access have admitted that such a punishment is less scary than being sued and potentially on the hook for millions of dollars.

So how did that work out? If the industry's logic is correct, than the fear of being hit with a multi-million dollar fine should be a lot more persuasive in (a) getting people to give up file sharing and (b) buy more instead. And yet... the industry is still freaking out, complaining about phantom "losses" and demanding new laws to protect them. So, if kicking people off the internet is less fearful than being on the hook for millions of dollars, and the potential of being sued for so much did not slow the growth of file sharing or get people to buy any more, can someone explain (please) how it's possible that anyone thinks kicking people off the internet will get them to buy?

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Joy! You can now buy a T-shirt featuring the likeness of everybody's favorite horrific-looking, behind-the-toilet-dwelling, cockroach-eating centipede. Will Bower from the Facebook group House Centipedes Are Your Friends sent a link to these great shirts, available on Etsy (where else?). The centipedes look hardcore, and (as you can tell by looking at the models) simply putting a Scutigera Coleoptrata on your chest is sure to make you appear 10x as hip as normal.

Scutigera Coleoptrata T-shirt
Scutigera Coleoptrata T-shirt, fitted version

CNETNate writes "Is the American mains socket really so much worse than the Italian design? And does the Italian socket fail at rivaling the sockets in British homes? This feature explores, in a not-at-all-parodic-and-anecdotal fashion, the designs, strengths and weaknesses of Earth's mains adapters. There is only one conclusion, and you're likely not to agree if you live in France. Or Italy. Or in fact most places." (For more plug pics and details, check out Wikipedia's list of the ones in current use.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Randy Sarafan writes:

The nice thing about IKEA furniture is that it is cheap and easy to hack. In other words, lets say that you were to buy two cheap $30 Gorm shelving units and assembled them to discover them that one was crooked. Well then, it would be really easy to spend an afternoon converting the crooked one into a solid, stylish and symmetric bookshelf bench. As you probably just guessed, this Instructable will show you how to convert a Gorm shelving unit into a bookshelf bench. With a few extra peices of hardware and a couple of basic power tools, you could be on your way to relaxation and organization all at the same time.

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According to 60 Minutes, the UCLA Medical Center moved a notorious Japanese mobster to the head of the liver transplant line after he donated $1 million to the program.

If you flip the Dodge Viper logo upside down, it looks like Daffy Duck. (Via Bits & Pieces)

Leander Kahney of Cult of Mac spotted this $0.99 app for the iPhone 3GS. It's called Car Finder and it helps you find your parked car.

The app uses the iPhone's camera to overlay the direction of your car and how far away it is. The app relies on the camera and a digital compass, and is  compatible only with the iPhone 3GS  running 3.1 or later.

Car Finder iPhone App Uses Augmented Reality To Find Your Wheels

coondoggie writes "The Federal Communications Commission and the US Department of Transportation are teaming up to develop what they called high-tech solutions to the growing problem of distracted or inattentive drivers. The DOT and FCC said they will set up a working group to evaluate technology-based answers to the distracted driving problem and will improve outreach efforts to educate the public about the dangers of texting while driving, talking on cell phones while driving, and other distracting behavior that can lead to deadly accidents, the agencies stated." Meanwhile, Korea has overturned a ban on dashboard TV-watching for taxi drivers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year we wrote about a copyright fight between George Lucas/Lucasfilm and Andrew Ainsworth, the guy who created the original costumes for the storm troopers in Star Wars. Ainsworth believes that he has every right to now sell storm trooper costumes. Lucas, and his licensing empire, feel otherwise. It got to the ridiculous level of Ainsworth claiming that Lucas actually owed him money, for all the free merchandising Ainsworth has done for the various Star Wars movies by selling his costumes. Eventually, the High Court in the UK tossed out Lucas' claims, saying that the costumes were not works of art and not covered by copyright in the UK. It did note that there may have been copyright infringement in the US, but said that Ainsworth was immune from a US court ruling on the subject since his US sales were not that big.

Apparently, Lucasfilm isn't happy about this and is appealing the ruling, claiming that the storm trooper costumes are indeed works of art, like sculptures. The whole thing, frankly, seems like a waste of time. Is it really that big of a concern to Lucasfilm if the guy who created the original costumes is selling them himself?

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Here's a neat idea from designers razy2. Instead of casting a chair out of foam or silicone, they decided to build one up layer by layer out of what looks like a giant Post-It pad. Because the paper is only attached on one side, you can scribble on the top layer and then just pull it off to clean up, or stick things between the layers. Sounds fun, but I would be pretty scared that I would spill something on it. [via core77]

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The number of people affected by food shortages is starting to rise again. Is the solution a new biotech version of the Green Revolution, or a green Green Revolution based on organic farming? The New York Times brought together six experts to address those questions. Most fall squarely on one side of the fence or the other, but I'm interested in the more balanced opinion of Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. I've done a lot of research on agriculture issues recently, both for National Geographic News and Discover magazine, and Foley's "third way" seems to make the most sense to me, in context with what I've been hearing from global agriculture experts.

Currently, there are two paradigms of agriculture being widely promoted: local and organic systems versus globalized and industrialized agriculture. Each has fervent followers and critics. Genuine discourse has broken down: You're either with Michael Pollan or you're with Monsanto. But neither of these paradigms, standing alone, can fully meet our needs.

Rather than voting for just one solution, we need a third way to solve the crisis. Let's take ideas from both sides, creating new, hybrid solutions that boost production, conserve resources and build a more sustainable and scalable agriculture. There are many promising avenues to pursue: precision agriculture, mixed with high-output composting and organic soil remedies; drip irrigation, plus buffer strips to reduce erosion and pollution; and new crop varieties that reduce water and fertilizer demand. In this context, the careful use of genetically modified crops may be appropriate, after careful public review.

Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger, in the New York Times, via the Science and Development Network.

Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

How I designed Makey, Part II: Creating the "stretchy" robot body in Inventor

When designing Makey the Robot for MAKE, Volume 19, I ran into a problem that plagues all kinds of designers -- how to continually redesign a body to accommodate changes in whatever's crammed inside it?

Once I'd sketched out Makey's configuration and modeled the major parts in Autodesk Inventor 3D modeling software, I really got into some of Inventor's awesome features. Inventor has three basic design types you work with: sketches, parts, and assemblies. Up to this point I had designed each individual component, including Makey's robot body, as a part, as shown in Figure A.

Fig. A: Makey's sheet metal body, near-final version, shown as a single part in Autodesk Inventor. Because I designed it as a component of an assembly, all the mounting holes and dropouts are perfectly aligned to internal robot components; if I move the components, Inventor automatically moves the holes.

Once I had these parts modeled, I placed them together into an assembly, as in Figure B. Then, I attempted to stretch the robot body as needed by making that part "Adaptive" inside the assembly. (That's what Inventor calls "stretchy" parts, and it's a powerful feature.)

Fig. B: Makey's body shown as part of an assembly in Inventor, constrained to the edges of the motors (at bottom, in blue). If I move the motors, the body automatically stretches to accommodate the new motor positions. Similarly, I constrained the battery boxes (at top, in tan) to the body, so wherever the body stretches, the battery boxes follow automatically. Nice!

Also, I cut holes into the body where I needed them for mounting the motors. This was the wrong approach! It seemed to work, but when I looked at the robot body as a part, outside of the assembly, the holes I had made weren't shown. They had simply vanished.

The reason for this is that Inventor can't know ahead of time how you're going to use a part. You could design one part that could be used in multiple assemblies, so if you alter the base part in any way inside one particular assembly, the alteration exists only in the assembly, but the base part is unchanged. Thus, my changes didn't "take hold."

The key was to create the robot body from inside the assembly. You can actually be inside an assembly and make a brand-new part. To do this, in the Assembly Panel area, instead of selecting Place Component, choose Create Component.

I ended up first creating what I called a "base plate," which existed solely to help me anchor all the parts, including the robot body. It would not be a part I would actually fabricate. I then placed the base plate, the motors, the Arduino, and the batteries into an assembly, using Place Component, and assembled it all by anchoring everything to the base plate (using constraints). This was pretty much what I had been doing before.

Now, still inside the assembly, I created a new part, via Create Component, which would become the robot body. I selected the material type Sheet Metal.ipt, since it's a sheet metal part, and created each bend and flange step by step, inside the assembly. This robot body now "belonged" to the assembly, and was adaptive inside the assembly. Any editing of it, from that point on, was always initiated from within the assembly.

Instead of making the body a specific width, I just made everything extra large with no dimensions. Once the body was formed, I finished editing, and now I was back inside the assembly with my new robot body. I then constrained the side of the body to an existing "edge" from another part, for instance, the sides of the motors (Figure B). When the constraint went into effect, the sides of the body "snapped" into place next to the motors. To make holes, I projected the motor mount holes onto the robot body, again edited the robot body part (from within the assembly), cut holes there, and then the holes "stayed put," so to speak.

Success at last -- I had modeled a fully adaptive robot body that I could easily modify to accommodate all the robot components I would be cramming inside it.

Next up: The battle to fit the brains inside.

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Watch: MP4 download, YouTube, Dotsub (with captions/text translations).

In this episode of Boing Boing Video, we test-drive "Sarriugarteis (Odontochile) trilobiteis," also known as The Electrobite.

This trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle was created by "Oilpunk" enthusiasts Kyrsten Mate + Jon Sarriugarte, with help from fellow makers Amy Jenkins and Tansy Brooks.

Pesco previously blogged about the little bugger here -- it's even been to Burning Man, where it no doubt terrified some trippin' hippies.

We shot this inside the Tcho Chocolate warehouse (thanks, Timothy!), with help from Boing Boing pals Eddie Codel and John Behrens. Special thanks to Karen Marcelo, who also shot the incriminating photo below.

D1gital_Prob3 writes "How can a 'smart' person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity — how much information you can hold in mind."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Medication" by Andrew Brandou, from his Jonestown paintings

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.

Some people use the word "cult" as a pejorative, a catchall for sects whose beliefs and practices fall out of the mainstream of organized religion. I use the word as a social scientist or psychologist would, to denote a coercive or totalizing relationship between a dominating leader and his or her unhealthily dependent followers. As I wrote in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, "what makes a cult cultish is not so much what it espouses, but how much authority its leaders grant themselves--and how slavishly devoted to them its followers are."

Robert Lifton, the distinguished psychologist and author of many books, including Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China (1961), defined cults in a 1981 letter in the Harvard Mental Health Letter as an "aspect of a worldwide epidemic of ideological totalism, or fundamentalism." Cults, he continued, can be identified by three characteristics: 1) A charismatic leader who makes him or herself an object of worship; 2) A process of "coercive persuasion or thought reform" ("brainwashing," it is sometimes called); and 3) Economic, sexual, or psychological exploitation of members by the cult's leadership. The chief tool of coercive persuasion, Lifton writes, is "milieu control: the control of all communication within a given environment." When a guru forbids new recruits from communicating with their families; when members are urged to make extravagant donations; and when a guru declares themselves infallible, either God's chosen messenger or God Himself, warning flags should go up.

In the last couple of weeks, I flagged news items about two cults -- one in New Zealand, one in Africa.

Twenty five members of a cult that forbids its members to eat cooked foods were recently arrested in Uganda for trespassing on privately held land, according to this article in the October 25th New Vision ("Uganda's leading website"); a similar group was arrested last summer and sentenced to a year in prison. Uganda's crackdown on cults began in 2000, when 500 members of a cult based in Kanungu commit suicide.

The death count was actually much higher-possibly more than 1000. And they weren't suicides, but murders. The victims were members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a Mariolatrous doomsday cult led by a former Catholic school administrator named Joseph Kibwetere and Dominic Kataribaabo, an excommunicated priest. In the early 1990s, they merged their group with one run by a seeress and ex-prostitute named Keledonia Mwerinde, who also received visions from Mary and Jesus; in 1997, they claimed to have 4500 followers. Members sold their possessions and donated the proceeds to the church. While they awaited the apocalypse-which was predicted for midnight, December 31, 2000-they lived in compounds, wore uniforms, worked twelve hour days in the sugar fields, and fasted two days a week. Sex was forbidden, as was speech-members communicated with each other in sign language. The cult's scripture, A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Times, which records the leaders' visions, was studied carefully. When Doomsday didn't arrive on schedule, church members grew restive; some demanded their property back. On March 17, 2000, more than 500 members-men, women, and children-were locked into a church that was set on fire; in the weeks that followed, a number of mass graves were uncovered. Click here to see the story from the April 1, 2000 Newsweek.

Warrants were issued for the top leadership of the church but they were never located. There were rumors that Mwerinde had murdered Kibwetere and Katariabaabo and fled with her family and the church's fortune; Kibwetere's wife later told authorities that he had died well before the fire, in 1999.

A New York Times article from March 19, 2000 provides an essential piece of context that helps explain why the Movement's millenarian message found so many receptive ears: "The church is 25 miles north of Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide, and 10 miles from Congo, where armies of six African nations have been drawn into a civil war." Some 5.4 million people were killed in that war; Uganda, of course, endured Idi Amin's bloody regime until 1979.

And then there's this, from just last weekend:

Newspapers, TV newscasts, and blogs in New Zealand lit up after 700 new members of The Destiny Church swore an oath of personal loyalty to its founder, Bishop Brian Tamaki, which reads: "To you Bishop we pledge our allegiance, our faithfulness and loyalty. We pledge to serve the cause that is in your heart and to finish that work. Success to you and success to those who help you - for God is with you." According to NZTV, "Mark Vrankovich from Cultwatch, says the covenant contains the type of mechanisms by which cults go askew. 'The pattern is the risk,' says Vrankovich who is upset that Tamaki seems to claim to be the mouthpiece of God. 'Destiny Church is not a Christian church following Jesus Christ. It is a church following a man by the name of Brian Tamaki who claims to be the mouthpiece of God.'" Tamaki's organization also sponsors New Zealand's ultra-conservative Family Party. In 2004, Tamaki said "I predict in the next five years, by the time we hit our 10th anniversary - and I don't say this lightly - that we will be ruling the nation."

It wasn't so much the oath that roused the furor as the document which accompanied it, entitled Protocols and Requirements Between Spiritual Father & His Spiritual Sons, which takes, Garth George of The New Zealand Herald noted, "1300 words to describe in jaw-dropping detail how the 'spiritual sons' shall behave towards their 'spiritual father.'" Sons are instructed to always speak of the Bishop and his wife "in a favourable and positive light" and cautioned to treat them with respect and dignity. "Even though he is very sociable and open--remember who he is!" Followers must rise when the Bishop enters the room and may sit only after he is seated. They must never criticize the Bishop or his family or the church themselves and should not allow anyone else to do so. "You are not only to stop them in their tracks but warn them that they criticize you when they criticize Bishop."

Tamaki, a high-school dropout, grew up on a farm and became deeply involved in a succession of Pentecostal churches in the late 1970s. He launched the Destiny Church in a warehouse in Auckland in 1998 with 20 members; today it claims 9000 members throughout New Zealand (and has opened a branch in Australia). Destiny Church has a close relationship with the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia; Tamaki calls its pastor Eddie Long his spiritual father.

Appropriately enough, Tamaki preaches the Prosperity Gospel, which has by all accounts worked very well for him and his family. Members tithe to the church; they also provide an annual "first fruits" gift to the pastor and his family, amounting to $300,000-$500,000. According to the New Zealand Herald:

Bishop Tamaki's six-figure salary is paid from church revenue, through the Destiny International Trust. He also receives revenue raised by the church's Proton Bookstore - where his messages can be bought on CD or DVD for between $10 and $20 - and Proton Gym.

Bishop Tamaki and Hannah are the sole shareholders in the Proton Trustee Company Ltd. The couple are also shareholders in Tamaki Productions Ltd and Tamaki Investments Ltd.

They own a $1.2 million clifftop home with views of the Hauraki Gulf, which is now for sale, and a $100,000 boat and expensive cars and motorcycles.

Just because you're a law professor, it doesn't mean you really understand the law, apparently. Eric Goldman (a law professor who does understand the law) alerts us to a bizarre lawsuit involving University of Miami law professor D. Marvin Jones, who was the subject of a series of blog posts on the popular law blog, AboveTheLaw, concerning a 2007 attempt where Jones was detained by police for allegedly soliciting a prostitute -- something he vehemently claims was not true, and authorities did, in fact, drop the charges and expunge the record. Jones makes a few different claims against ATL, all of which seem frivolous and unlikely to stand, but the most ridiculous of all is the claim that his copyright was violated by ATL using his faculty photo. A few problems with that: It's quite unlikely that Jones actually holds the copyright on the photo, and he makes no effort to show that the copyright was ever registered (a necessary prerequisite in bringing a copyright infringement lawsuit). And, of course, if somehow it turns out he does own the copyright and did register it, it's still an obvious (not even close) fair use claim. Now it's quite clear that the posts were embarrassing to Jones -- especially assuming that it's true that the original detainment was bogus, but it's difficult to see how bringing a poorly thought out lawsuit against the site fixes that. If anything, it seems to reflect even more poorly on Jones.

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palegray.net writes "SORBS, a well-known email blocklist provider, has reportedly been sold for $451k. Early reports indicate an acquisition by GFI, a company specializing in various communications services. In recent years, SORBS has been the target of frequent accusations of mismanagement and poor conduct, leading many to wonder if this turn in events might signal a chance for improved behavior. Citing lack of ISP support, the blocklist released statements earlier this year that they would be shuttering their operation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo files antitrust suit against chip maker Intel. Intel is charged with violating state and federal law by abusing its leading position in the chip market to keep rival AMD at bay.

A court in Saudi Arabia will uphold a ruling to behead and publicly crucify a 22-year-old man who raped five children and left one of them to die in the desert.

The US military's Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA hasn't done enough to take out the Bad Guys, one by one. No: America needs a "National Manhunting Agency" to hunt down jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state. I suggest a rebrand: "Manhunting Agency" sounds a bit too much like a gay dating site. [Wired Danger Room]

Zach Hoeken wrote up a nice piece about the design of the MakerBot Frostruder MK2, currently in its second prototype. He talks about the challenges of designing a cheap, small device capable of computer-controlled cupcake frosting:

My first experiment was with some thick, chocolate frosting that you can find in nearly any grocery store. I simply wanted to see if it was possible to use air pressure to extrude frosting, so I wired up a solenoid to a switch and used that solenoid to turn the air pressure on and off to the syringe. I was using a 21GA (0.53mm) needle and a standard 60cc syringe. I hooked it up to the air pressure and opened the valve. Nothing happened right away, but I gradually turned the pressure up until about 50-60 PSI I started getting a frosting extrusion. I kept turning up the pressure to about 80 PSI where I got a really nice, very fast frosting extrusion that was about 0.5mm wide. Success!!!

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here, or buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

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Michael Geist sez, "According to the official agenda, in a few hours the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks will continue on the Internet provisions and then move into the criminal provisions chapter. It is worth highlighting the ongoing criminal provisions as well. As previously leaked, the U.S. and Japan supplied the initial text for this chapter. Their proposal included extending criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. In other words, non-commercial infringement could lead to criminal penalties. Plus, jail time for unauthorized camcording of films and even for fake DVD and CD packaging."

ACTA Negotiations, Day Two: What's On Tap (Thanks, Michael!)

Noiser writes "New Scientist reports: 'In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentence of 9 years and 2 months. An appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout's sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noiser writes "New Scientist reports: 'In 2007, Abdelmalek Bayout admitted to stabbing and killing a man and received a sentence of 9 years and 2 months. An appeal court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout's sentence by a year after finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welcome to the fourth serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF thriller 7th Son: Descent (part 1, 2, 3), a novel set in present day featuring human cloning, dangerous technologies, and "beyond Top Secret" government conspiracies .

THE STORY SO FAR: Yesterday, seven men were kidnapped and brought to a secret government science facility. There, they discovered that they were unwitting human clones, with identical flesh and childhood memories. Their creators assembled them to stop the man behind the recent assassination of the U.S. president: a psychopath code-named John Alpha ... the very man they were cloned from years ago.

John, Kilroy2.0, Father Thomas and the other "Beta Clones" were told that Alpha's plans for chaos were just beginning, and he had terrifying technologies at his disposal that permit him to record and implant human memories into anyone. Further, he abducted Dania Sheridan, the woman the clones remember as their mother ... and left a clue for them to find him.

Part IV

Disposable cameras have been around for quite some time now. So why not disposable laptops? That's the question designer Je Sung Park is asking with the Recyclable Paper Laptop, which he imagines could be layers of materials and chips that can be easily replaced. It seems like a long shot (or does it?), but I'm digging its brown paper look. Yanko Design has a few more images of this proposed design.

It appears that Wall Street is giving up on Palm after sales of the Pre have been massively disappointing, and Sprint (their only US partner) appears to be focusing more and more on HTC Android-powered phones these days. At the same time, developers are recognizing that if they're creating mobile apps, they need to decide which platforms to work on, and the markets for the iPhone and Android smartphones look a lot more exciting.

This is, in large part, due to poor planning on the part of Palm and Sprint. First, Palm was way too slow in really opening up its developer program. By the time it finally got around to it, more and more Android phones were hitting the market, with much more of a marketing push. Developers, given the choice, will go for the platform that actually has users. That's why I still say it was a huge mistake for Palm and Sprint not to have figured out a way to give away the Palm Pre for free. The thing that Pre needed more than anything else was market share. With market share it could attract developers and a loyal following. Without that, Palm is dead and everyone knows it. Having failed at that, and now thrown away its head start over the rush of Android-powered devices hitting the market, Palm is quickly looking like an afterthought, just months after the Pre was released.

I actually stopped by a Sprint store earlier this week, because I was interested in seeing its recent Android-powered phones in person. I played around with them, and then picked up the Palm Pre as well -- and I have to admit that the hardware on the Pre is really nice. It's just a much nicer overall package than the HTC Hero (an Android-powered phone) -- more compact, had a more solid feel, and the slide out keyboard is actually quite nice (if a bit small). But, after seeing all the developer support moving towards Android, I have no interest in betting on a dying OS. And that's when I wondered why Palm didn't just release an Android-powered Pre as well. I recognize that it's got a lot invested in webOS, but it's a sunk cost and a losing strategy.

A few years back, after years supporting its own Palm operating system, the company started offering Treo's that supported Windows Mobile. It's time to do that again, but for Android, letting the company actually make use of a much larger, committed developer community, rather than trying to keep the whole thing in-house.

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With gaming's current trend toward the nostalgic taking us on Bit.Trips and Extreme invasions, and with indies giving us de-made versions of modern classics, it more or less follows logically that we'd eventually see the imageat top. Recognize it? Likely not off the bat, but you'd be surprised what a little motion and original sound can do to a 15-pixel panorama. Below the fold, then, the answer to the riddle plus several handfuls more in the lowest-res high-res gallery you'll ever witness, courtesy UK animation group Alaskan Military School and their viral videos for just-completed British games festival GameCity.

Alaskan's Street Fighter II video nails an honestly quite legible one-on-one bout, with Ken's whirling signature Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku rendered in a simple -| |- cycle.

Their version of foundational PlayStation rhythm classic Parappa might be less readable without first-hand knowledge of the game, but if you've spent any time in its opening dojo level, the dog-wonder and his erstwhile teacher's palette fill in all the gaps.

And the last of the short-version virals: Noby Noby Boy, the PS3 follow-up to Keita Takahashi's cult classic Katamari Damacy, in which the low-res boy performs reaches his stretching point and pops into his bands of alternating colors.

And finally, the team's epic finishing flourish: a mega-mix of the selections above bolstered by a handful of others that begs for a contest to recognize them all, with a hint that possibly its least recognizable section (the crowd-cheered guitar licks) comes from a very undeservedly overlooked game, but that the Theme is no less Legendary.

For more information on Alaskan Military School and their collected animated output, check their official site and Vimeo page.

Here's the Suggested User List as a list.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/twitter-s-sul

How I produced it.

I created a fake account, gristmillie, visited the Suggested Users page, checked them all and followed them. Then, from my own account, I went to the page of people she follows, went through each one and checked it, adding it to my list.

A caveat, this will go out of date when they add more people to the list.

Here's the listbrowser.org rendering, and the OPML version.

Now an editorial...

It seems that Twitter should have made this list, as part of the rollout of lists, but then I guess they'd be ashamed of what a crappy list it is. It's so random, and reveals so much about how shallow they are, and how little ambition they have for Twitter, and how little thought goes into its evolution.

The Twitter founders boast about wanting to change the world, but having taken a close look at where the SUL is today I can tell you, for sure, I hope they don't.

Maybe it would be better if they let the world change them.

Further, some pop culture is good, a very small amount of it is great. I love movies, and great television and music, but Twitter isn't that -- it was supposed to be real life. At least that's what I thought. What the SUL reveals is that Twitter is a scattershot view of pop culture. There's no rhyme or reason to it, no art to it.

As I was going through the list, I unfollowed everyone who I was following. I think these people ought to be ashamed at being included in this list and not demanding to be removed from it. I guess I understand their logic, but I don't understand the lack of self-respect. If you want me to read your tweets, delete your account, start a new one and let me know where it is. I don't imagine anyone will do it, but I will openly applaud anyone who does.

BTW, I initially thought that TechCrunch was off the list, but this was incorrect. They have my account blocked, so I can't add them to my rendering of the list. They are indeed on the SUL.

MahlonS writes "AP is reporting on a suit filed in Northern Georgia in which AT&T claims that Verizon's 'There's a Map for That' ads are misleading and amount to deceptive trade practices. Verizon had already agreed to modify their original ad to include a tag line that voice and data services are available outside 3G coverage areas." What's interesting is that on some level, this is actually a lawsuit over data visualization.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MahlonS writes "AP is reporting on a suit filed in Northern Georgia in which AT&T claims that Verizon's 'There's a Map for That' ads are misleading and amount to deceptive trade practices. Verizon had already agreed to modify their original ad to include a tag line that voice and data services are available outside 3G coverage areas. " What's interesting is that on some level, this is actually a lawsuit over data visualization.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Nunn demonstrates the "skatchbox" a simple percussion box outfitted with contacts mics and a plethora of objects for scraping, tapping, swiping, etc. The shuffling and raspy textures the boxes make are pretty unique, certainly warranting further investigation by audio experimentalists out there. And if you've got some plastic combs, a piezo disc, and a flat box building one of these should be a breeze.

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A brand-spanking new Authentic Jobs has launched, now with realigned identity, better search and filtering, more compelling listings and more. Post a job today and get 20% off with promo code RETOOLED. Congrats to the AJ team!

Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to 'national security' concerns, has leaked. It's bad." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pretty amazing costume build tutorial from Instrucables user Incrxtc.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

The Arduino-based synth project formerly known as binder synth is now known as Adasynth - and it sounds like development is coming along right nicely. Davitr0n provides some background on his project -

The goal of this project was to make a patchable synthesizer as versatile as we can while keeping the cost down.  Since I know how to program C++ and have a basic understanding of electronics we chose to use an arduino. So far we’ve stayed pretty true to that goal.  With just the arduino, a resistor chip, some recycled wood, and a lot of help in the form of interface components (plugs and jacks) from my old electronics teacher we have a working synthesizer.. and to be honest the results so far are much better than we expected.

Here's hoping he posts source/schematic - patchable digital synthesis looks like fun!

Arduino Pocket Piano Synth Kit

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Red Midnight and other readers brought to our attention a bug in most deployed versions of Linux that could result in untrusted users getting root access. The bug was found by Brad Spengler last month. "The null pointer dereference flaw was only fixed in the upcoming 2.6.32 release candidate of the Linux kernel, making virtually all production versions in use at the moment vulnerable. While attacks can be prevented by implementing a common feature known as mmap_min_addr, the RHEL distribution... doesn't properly implement that protection... The... bug is mitigated by default on most Linux distributions, thanks to their correct implementation of the mmap_min_addr feature. ... [Spengler] said many other Linux users are also vulnerable because they run older versions or are forced to turn off [mmap_min_addr] to run certain types of applications." The register reprints a dialog from the OpenBSD-misc mailing list in which Theo De Raadt says, "For the record, this particular problem was resolved in OpenBSD a while back, in 2008. We are not super proud of the solution, but it is what seems best faced with a stupid Intel architectural choice. However, it seems that everyone else is slowly coming around to the same solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, we wrote about that that ridiculous attempt by 60 Minutes to do a story about movie piracy that was basically one long press release for the MPAA's position. Facts weren't checked, and the reporter, Leslie Stahl, didn't bother to push back on a single claim made by any of the (all industry insider) guests. However, Boing Boing points us to a "radio documentary" on piracy that was done on Australian radio the very same day as the 60 Minutes episode aired. You may notice a major difference in that the Australian radio folks actually looked at the facts, invited on people who could refute industry claims, and actually pushed back on claims by the industry:

Adrianne Pecotic (from anti-piracy group AFACT): The fact that there is a level of illegitimate consumption of film and television is something that detracts from the revenue that could go back into the industry and could go back into supporting local video stores, local cinemas and online distribution. Theft is not justified because someone is being successful, and that's a really important point in this debate.

Oscar McLaren (radio host): But it does seem strange that I mean, we're told in quite apocalyptic terms often that the video industry and the film industry is really starting to hurt. I don't imagine many people would actually be aware that the revenues are in fact going up quite steadily and have been for the past decade or so.

Adrianne Pecotic: I think the important thing about the losses that are being suffered by the film industry through piracy, is that individual investors in individual films rely on that investment in that particular film, for that film maker, or that investor as their entire revenue. If you're looking at the analysis across the board of the whole industry and whether it is going up or whether more people are consuming films or less people are consuming films, you're not asking the question of whether a particular film has had the opportunity to recoup its proper revenue.

Oscar McLaren: For the record, box office sales were also at all-time high levels last year, reaching nearly $1-billion.

The program also pushed back against the repeated claim that a download is no different than shoplifting:

Oscar McLaren: But many lawyers in the debate argue that stealing a physical object is very different to breaching intellectual property laws....

Jessica Litman: The difference between a song and a cookie is if I eat a cookie, then you can't have it because I've eaten it, it's gone. But if I listen to a song, you can listen to a song, your friend can listen to a song, anyone can listen to a song, and because intellectual property is capable of being enjoyed by many people at the same time, it's subject to somewhat different rules than cookies. Or houses, or other kinds of property.

The report goes in-depth in other areas as well, including a discussion on fair use/fair dealing, the history of copyright (and how it's often been abused in the name of artists, when it really had nothing to do with them) and the importance of mashup/remix culture. It's the sort of report that a program like 60 Minutes could have -- and should have -- done, but did not. Kudos to ABC radio down in Australia.

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SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whose diminishing over time we discussed a bit earlier). "The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm. Then they rubbed a cream onto the arm and told the volunteers that it contained a painkiller, but in fact it had no active ingredient. Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish. 'This type of mechanism has been envisioned for over 40 years for placebo analgesia,' says Donald Price, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the new study. 'This study provides the most direct test of this mechanism to date.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Justin fused the convenience of digital music with the feel and playback functionality of a cassette -

It is a cassette tape adapter and a micro usb port hooked up to a tiny mp3 player that I picked up at target. Its a simple build and only took an evening. Its an on going project I started a while back.

Neat idea! More pics plus earlier versions of the project can be found on Justin's blog. Hmmm ... maybe the next incarnation could have FF/REW capabilities triggered by turning the spools?

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If you've ever shopped at an Apple store you've probably experienced their relaxed point of sale (POS) system. You walk in, try out new gear, talk to a sales rep, swipe your card, sign a screen, blurt an email address, and you're out of there. Usually you skip the register, yet your wallet always seems lighter after each visit. It's all very smooth and thought out. But something has always bugged me about the whole process. The sales reps have always used a third-party mobile device to complete the transaction. It just didn't go well with the jeans and black turtleneck vibe.

Well, it would seem that Apple has picked up on customers pestering them about this minor user experience discrepancy and are about to remedy the situation with a new POS system based on their wildly popular iPod touch mobile entertainment device. Dubbed EasyPay, each unit will consist of a iPod touch and a special case which houses a barcode scanner, card reader, extra battery and mini-USB connector. The system runs custom POS software and uses a Pogo Sketch stylus to capture cardholder signatures.

Apple's new iPod touch-based EasyPay checkout [via AppleInsider]

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Admittedly it's just an estimate, but reports coming out of Sweden suggest that, rather than stop file sharing, under the new IPRED law, a growing number of file sharing users have simply gone further underground using anonymizing services. Of course, this shouldn't surprise anyone, as plenty of people have been predicting that's exactly that would happen for the better part of a decade. You would think that folks in the entertainment industry might actually pay attention since those predictions from years back have come true. But instead, they'd rather attack those of us who have pointed out why their strategy isn't working. At what point do they stop and realize that their critics actually are giving them good advice?

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Hiraga Gennai (1729-79) was an Edo period Japanese pharmacologist, physician, author, painter, and inventor who is well known for his Erekiteru (electrostatic generator). The Gennai Hiraga's Spark Generator kit by Gakken replicates his early work in creating static charges. Easy to build -- instructions are in Japanese but feature highly detailed assembly pictures (sorry, no English translation at this time).


MAKE is proud to be the exclusive distributor in North America for these brilliant kits from Gakken.

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Jared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Giger is a really cool looking humanoid robot with impressive specs. The bot stands about 2 feet tall, weighs in around 11 lbs, has a WiFi camera, and runs embedded Linux. Did I mention it cost $10,000 to build! I guess all those actuators are expensive!

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Recently, Verizon came up with a rather clever ad campaign, mocking the iPhone ads that claim "there's an app for that" with ads that showcase Verizon's wider 3G footprint, claiming "there's a map for that," and showing the two services' 3G coverage maps side by side: It does a nice job poking fun at one of AT&T's weaker points: its mobile network infrastructure. But apparently, AT&T is not happy with the ad campaign and has sued Verizon over those ads, claiming that it uses an unfair comparison. That's because the maps only show 3G coverage, and Verizon has significantly greater 3G coverage. However, AT&T feels that the map showing its coverage implies, falsely, that AT&T has no coverage outside of its 3G coverage areas. While you can see why AT&T would make this complaint, it does make you wonder if it's really worth the effort to sue. All it's really doing is attracting a lot more attention to the original ad, which does accurately state that it's talking about 3G coverage, not overall coverage, though you can see why some people might not realize that AT&T's network also includes non-3G areas.

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An anonymous reader writes "Google Latitude has already made headlines for allowing phone users to locate their friends, and there are countless other iPhone and Android phone apps already designed to transmit your location — but could pets be the next big thing in GPS tracking? A number of device manufacturers are marketing GPS technology as a futuristic tool for tracking your cat or dog, and even discovering exactly where they've been. These devices are sold under a number of names and brands, including Sportdog, LoCATor, RoamEO, Petcell, Zoombak and Pettrack."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a very nice bit of video documenting the recent Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford.

Steampunk Art @ Oxford

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A guy in Aspen accidentally dropped his mobile phone into the piles of leaves he was raking up, and scooped up the phone and sent it off to the dump... But, amazingly, he was reunited with the phone by calling it and hearing it ring in the piles and piles of recyclables. Apparently, it took about half an hour of dialing/listening/sifting. Of course, there are times when you wonder if it wouldn't just be smarter to go get another phone...

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This $60,000 "bomb detection wand" is much-loved by Iraqi security forces. American military representatives say it's about as useful for finding IEDs as a ouija board. [New York Times]

Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called "Radical Presentism," about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future.

Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn't worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.

Now, it's true that some writers will tell you they're extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they're just wrong. Karel ?apek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the "Singularity"--the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it's a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it's just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

James Hughes sez, "The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is holding a seminar on the 'Biopolitics of Popular Culture' December 4, 2009 in Irvine, California. The seminar will explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of the future, enhanced humans and emerging technology in literature, film, gaming and television. Speakers include Annalee Newitz, Richard Kadrey, Natasha Vita-More and Jamais Cascio, as well as writers for TV and film, game designers, artists and culture critics."

Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar (Thanks, Jim!)

The Google Earth Alphabet has upper and lower case and numbers and punctuation formed inadvertently by geographic features visible from space.

Upper case

Lower case

Numbers and punctuation

(via Making Light)

cyclocommuter writes "Some Toyota owners are up in arms as they suspect that accidents have been caused by some kind of glitch in the electronic computer system used in Toyotas that controls the throttle. Refusing to accept the explanation of Toyota and the federal government (it involves the driver's-side floor mat), hundreds of Toyota owners are in rebellion after a series of accidents caused by what they call 'runaway cars.' Four people have died." The article notes: "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has done six separate investigations of such acceleration surges in Toyotas since 2003 and found no defect in Toyota's electronics."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robert Popper has posted an appreciation of Supreme Master Television, a cult-backed satellite television network I've seen advertised in airports around the world, but never before bothered to google. There's a lot to love in this clip. Robert: I'd like to know when we can say "hebbo!" to a Tarvuist Faith television channel.

Supreme Master TV has a website, the cult behind it operates a chain of vegan restaurants, and they have offices in Southern California. Their leader is one Supreme Master Ching Hai, and Rick Ross says it's more like ka-ching. That's her, at left (click for large size), and here's a Wikipedia article. She sells hair extensions and stuff. She has opinions on global warming. She sings spiritual lounge music. She designs "celestial clothes and sleeping mattresses for dogs," which are spiritually themed costumes designed to bring your "blessed canine friend" closer to enlightenment. If you do one thing today, please: watch the dog video.

Stunning...

Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. In order to increase the dynamic range beyond the 16 bits of the camera's analog-to-digital converter (of which approx. 12 bits provide data above the noise level), three different exposure times (240 s, 15 s and 0.5 s) were used. Five frames were taken for each exposure time and filter setting. The fields were photometrically calibrated using standard catalog stars and sky background data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The new panorama has an image scale of 36 arcsec/pixel (approx. 3× the resolution of the old, film-based mosaic), a limiting magnitude of approx. 14 mag and an 18 bit dynamic range. At full resolution and bit depth, it is a 648 MPixel, 7.7 GByte FITS cube. Unlike the old image, the new panorama was carefully calibrated to preserve the large-scale star and dust clouds.

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The FBI has filed criminal charges against a hardware hacker in Oregon for modding cable modems. Unlocked cable modems can be used to steal service (or speed upgrades) from broadband providers, but they can be used for legal hackery, too. (Wired, thx @salimfadhley, via @bbsuggest)

Lots of people use private registration services for domain names, that lets them register a domain name while keeping their own identities private. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do so: they don't want spam or they want to keep the identity of the site owners anonymous. However, in a recent spam lawsuit, the Ninth District court of appeals has said that using such a service is "material falsification" of information:

[P]rivate registration is a service that allows registration of a domain name in a manner that conceals the actual registrant's identity from the public absent a subpoena. We fail to perceive any vagueness on this point. Based on the plain meaning of the relevant terms discussed above, private registration for the purpose of concealing the actual registrant's identity would constitute "material falsification." Defendants assert that many innocent people who privately register without the requisite intent may be subject to investigation for violation of § 1037 until their intent can be determined, allowing for abuse by enforcement authorities. This may be so, but it does not make the statute unconstitutionally vague.

While CAN SPAM requires a combination of both material falsification and intent to send spam, it does open up some questions about potential legal problems for anyone who uses such a private registration service in a variety of lawsuits (if those lawsuits are in the Ninth Circuit, of course). The court does seem to admit that this could cause problems, but the job of the court isn't to stop those problems, just to interpret the law.

Separately, in the same lawsuit, the court ruled that the appropriate "community" for judging obscenity standards in email is the "national community" rather than the local community. I have enough problems with the whole "community standards" method of judging "obscenity" in the first place (well, I have trouble with "obscenity" laws entirely), but if you have to have them, it does seem that a national standard makes more sense than a local standard when it comes to email that could go to anyone in any community. As Thomas O'Toole notes in his writeup, the ruling is a bit of a mess, and should keep First Amendment lawyers busy (though, the same is true of any obscenity laws...).

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Interactive webmap of the SF Bay Area that shows which 'hoods will drown first when the waters rise in GlobalWarmingGeddon. Here is a similar project I blogged earlier this year. (thanks, Dave Bullock)

Shanghai will host the World Expo next year, and city officials are preparing for the influx of foreigners with a campaign to ban citizens from wearing their pajamas out in the streets. An article in the Chengdu Business Daily expresses outrage over the campaign as a civil rights abuse. Snip:

Many Shanghai residents are used to loitering around the streets in their pajamas. But now the municipal government is making every effort to stop them from doing so, because it would be a "loss of face" for city authorities if a foreigner sees people walking the streets in pajamas during the 2010 World Expo. (...)

As a modern international metropolis, Shanghai has been playing host to foreigners for decades. So why have pajamas become embarrassing only now? And will it be okay for people to walk the streets in pajamas after the World Expo? Why should we change our habits and customs to suit foreigners' taste when we travel abroad as well as when we play host to them? Do we suffer from a sense of inferiority?

What's wrong with a person in pajamas? [via Rebecca MacKinnon]

A quick Google of "shanghai" + "pajamas" reveals many articles in Western media over the past decade about Shanghai's pajama-wearing citizenry, and their government's fruitless attempts to mandate their fashion choices. Apparently, walking around in the street in your jammies is a familiar part of local culture in old neighborhoods there, in part because the realms of public and private space are so blurred in daily life.

toppings writes "Microsoft Technical fellow Mark Russinovich explains why he is now retiring NewSID, which has been used by IT departments for years when deploying Windows to new systems from customized clone images. Russinovich writes: 'The reason that I began considering NewSID for retirement is that, although people generally reported success with it on Windows Vista, I hadn't fully tested it myself and I got occasional reports that some Windows component would fail after NewSID was used. When I set out to look into the reports I took a step back to understand how duplicate SIDs could cause problems, a belief that I had taken on faith like everyone else. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that machine SID duplication — having multiple computers with the same machine SID — doesn't pose any problem, security or otherwise. I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue. At that point the decision to retire NewSID became obvious.' He concludes: 'It's a little surprising that the SID duplication issue has gone unquestioned for so long, but everyone has assumed that someone else knew exactly why it was a problem. To my chagrin, NewSID has never really done anything useful and there's no reason to miss it now that it's retired. Microsoft's official policy on SID duplication will also now change and look for Sysprep to be updated in the future to skip SID generation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On December 7th in San Francisco, there will be the next SF MusicTech Summit, which is a great event that I've been to a few times before. It really does a great job covering technology and business models that are impacting the music industry in a very positive, productive way. I've had some of the best conversations about the industry with folks at that event. I'll be there again, taking part on a panel, and the organizers have agreed to let Techdirt readers have a 15% discount on tickets if ordered through our site. I hope to see you there.

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Want to rock out, but forget to bring your instrument? Then you might want to check out Instrumentube, a collection of YouTube-based instruments that you play by dragging the video time slider to match up to the correct note. I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to play music, but it is a pretty funny hack.

[Thanks, Jacob!]

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Mayor Mike says: "John Nese is the owner of Soda Pop Stop pop only store in LA. Listening to him rattle off what makes or breaks a good soft drink, makes me thirsty. Listening to his passion about supporting the little man in the face of large corporate pressure in the marketplace is just plain refreshing."

Galcos Soda Pop Stop in LA

Sara says:

I'm an archival researcher--I work part-time at Princeton Architectural Press in the editorial department and the other half of the week freelance researching book projects. Last year I researched the subject of Nothing for the author Joan Konner (former Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism). Her book, You Don't Have to be Buddhist to Know Nothing, just came out last week. It's a sound bite history of the presence of Nothing in Western thought (including some essential bites from Eastern minds as well). The quotations come from a long list of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars (Dickinson, Sartre, Beckett, Rilke, Shakespeare, but also Steven Wright, Edward Albee, Philippe Petit, etc.). A really neat collage of Nothing.

The blog is a delight! I didn't know so much could be said about nothing.

You Don't Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing

Why does it matter if one child gets vaccinated and another child doesn't? Slate.com explains why the private decisions you make for your own children can have serious consequences for the health of other people's kids.

A Verizon commercial depicts the dismal extent of AT&T's 3G coverage. AT&T is suing, claiming the map confuses customers. [Engadget]

I mentioned recently that, for some idiotic reason, Hulu has stopped letting me view any of its content. That's because I use WiTopia's VPN service for security reasons. It seems that plenty of other WiTopia users are discovering this, as well, and are getting annoyed. The issue is that Hulu wants to block people from outside the US from viewing its content (for licensing reasons, even if they're pretty pointless in today's world). But, for some bizarre reason, it's been decided that anyone who uses any sort of VPN or proxy can't use Hulu at all because they might be coming from a foreign country. I'm sitting here in California and Hulu tells me I might be illegally accessing its content, so it doesn't allow it. So, instead, I don't give Hulu any additional ad views and I don't watch the content I wanted to watch. How does that help anyone? It appears to make everyone worse off. And it's not like WiTopia is some free anonymous proxy -- it's a pay-service that has been around for ages and is used regularly for WiFi security purposes. Many of its users are US-based (the company is based in the US, and most of its servers are in the US as well). So, because (gasp!) a small group of people outside the US might dare to catch a video (with ads!!), all of Witopia's US customers can't watch any content at all? This is the same ridiculous content industry mindset that drives so many people to unauthorized file sharing: they treat you as a criminal first and force you to prove you're not (or sometimes, don't even let you prove otherwise). The problem the industry is facing isn't due to some guy in Europe catching The Colbert Report from across the sea. It comes from turning off legitimate customers and users who are sick of being treated like crap.

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I was fortunate to meet artist James Gurney at Babytattooville last month. He's the creator of the gorgeous Dinotopia series of books, and is a very friendly guy. His work reminds me of old masters of book illustration like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle.

James has a new book out called Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist, in which he describes his creative process. It's a rare treat to learn how a talented artist creates his art. James has also made a couple of fun YouTube videos to promote the book: Gallery Flambeau Video and Unicycle Painter.

Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

I was fortunate to meet artist James Gurney at Babytattooville last month. He's the creator of the gorgeous Dinotopia series of books, and is a very friendly guy. His work reminds me of old masters of book illustration like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle.

James has a new book out called Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist, in which he describes his creative process. It's a rare treat to learn how a talented artist creates his art. James has also made a couple of fun YouTube videos to promote the book: Gallery Flambeau Video and Unicycle Painter.

Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Scientific American has a piece on speculation that dark matter may be behind diffuse radiation in the galactic center. Beginning in 2003, researchers led by Douglas Finkbeiner noticed a curious excess of microwave radiation in the WMAP data, after all known sources of such radiation were accounted for. Data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope resulted in a similar anomoly in gamma rays. "A paper posted to the physics preprint Web site arXiv.org on October 26 and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal points to a possible signature of dark matter in the Milky Way, although the study's authors are careful to keep their observations empirical and table such speculation... In the new paper [the researchers] describe the Fermi gamma-ray haze and make the claim that it confirms the synchrotron origin of the WMAP microwave haze. And as with the microwave haze, the authors argue that the electrons responsible for the gamma-ray haze appear to originate from an unknown astrophysical process. ... 'We are absolutely in the process of exploring the Fermi haze in the context of dark matter physics,' [one of them] says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After I posted my photo of a praying mantis in my back yard, Boing Boing reader The Black Sickle shared this terrific HD video he shot (with a Nikon D90) of a mantis eating a grasshopper. (Click the HQ button in the YouTube player for high quality.)

After I posted my photo of a praying mantis in my back yard, Boing Boing reader The Black Sickle shared this terrific HD video he shot (with a Nikon D90) of a mantis eating a grasshopper. (Click the HQ button in the YouTube player for high quality.)