Popular Science is reporting that a piece of bread, dropped by a passing bird, has managed to damage the Large Hadron Collider.

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.

If this really is the work of time-traveling Higgs boson particles, however, they're demonstrating a lot of creativity, but not a lot of competence. The Bird Incident won't delay the reactivation of the facility, which is still scheduled for later this month.

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down the Large Hadron Collider (Really), Popular Science. You should follow the link just to see their illustration "according to eyewitness accounts". Via stevesilberman.

Just a few weeks ago, in writing about the pointlessness of "derivative rights" in copyright law, I questioned the "example" of an answer key for a textbook, noting that there was no reason to have it covered by copyright:

But, to me, this seems ridiculous on a basic common sense reading. I can't fathom how anyone can (at least honestly) claim that copyright really has an idea/expression dichotomy and then say that Section 106(2) makes any sense at all. What's wrong if someone else wants to produce an answer guide to an original textbook? Why would it ever make policy sense to deny such a right? In most cases, you would assume that the original creator of the textbook would have a better understanding of the topics and the answers, so an "unauthorized" answer key is unlikely to be as valuable. But why should it be prevented? On top of that, if the answer key is just answering questions, then how could it be infringement? Those answers are accurate "facts" responding to questions. If an answer key is infringing, then wouldn't that make student answers infringing as well?

Apparently, though, others don't agree -- and they're the folks who make the rules. Michael Scott points us to the news that a court has ruled that answers to a textbook questions are a derivative work, and someone who was selling such answers online was infringing on the copyright of the textbook publisher. This still makes no sense to me. First, there's no "copying." Second, isn't answering a question a "factual" statement? How can answering a question be copyright infringement? From a policy and common sense perspective it makes no sense. But, that's what you get with the way copyright law is these days. It's not about the incentive to create, but about stifling competition and free speech. In the meantime, I can't wait to see the next student sued for copyright infringement for answering his homework questions.

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Mark Frauenfelder and Dan Woods got sent this letter about the latest issue of MAKE, Volume 20. We got the sender's permission to post it here:

Mark and Dan,

This is Jim Kelly, the freelance tech writer in Atlanta. Hope you guys are doing well.

Just wanted to write and tell you how impressed and inspired I am with issue 20 of MAKE magazine. The interview (and foreword) with Adam Savage was extremely fun to read. As a father of a 2.5 year old, I too am anxious to encourage my son to explore, take apart, design, and enjoy the creative process.

Issue 20 was directed at kids, and I think you hit the bullseye, with force behind it. I hope this issue is one of your bestselling ones, and I for one am encouraging parents I know to pick up a copy. I'm also purchasing a few extra copies for some teachers I know.

My son just got done watching me configure my new CNC machine to mill out some fun designs on wood; his eyes could not have opened any wider. I wish all kids could have access to this level of technology and machinery, but unfortunately, our school systems seem to be cutting shop class and art projects and focusing time and money on standardized test-taking skills... how unfortunate.

To bring this all home, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is such a demand for material/content that encourages our youth that a void has been created and cannot be filled fast enough. MAKE is in a unique spot to develop something that goes a little beyond the Maker Shed and the quarterly magazine. Maybe it's a subscription-based activity website, with monthly special projects broken down into categories such as "Do It Yourself" (no parents required), "Dad and Me" (or "Mom and Me" - projects with the parents), and more. Maybe it's a special magazine (like your Halloween special issue) that focuses on even more kid-friendly content. Or maybe a mixture of projects and inspirational interviews (Dean Kamen comes to mind) in a book format.

I'll wrap this up by saying that I, Jim Kelly, hate the three month wait between issues of MAKE... I read every issue over and over again. I'm starved for this type of content. And I'm an adult - imagine what those kids who have this creative streak inside them must feel? They're in need of something... not sure what... and maybe you guys can figure out what to offer them. Issue 20 could easily be just the tip of the iceberg.

Take care,

Jim Kelly

Thanks for your thoughts and kind words, Jim. Reaching the educational market, be it home-schooling parents or teachers in grade school and college, is an increasing focus of ours. We see the new Make: Science Room as part of that effort. We also have the Make: Education social network to reach out to educators and and to create a place where they can network with each other. We've also been working on a dynamic new project-based program of making and mentoring designed to raise the next generation of makers. We're developing this with some very innovative, high-profile partners and are very excited about the prospects. Stay tuned -- we'll be making an announcement about this in the next few months and looking for some kids to participate in a pilot program.

We'd also like to point out that there is something to tide maker parents, kids, and educators over between issues of the magazine: this website, Make: Online! Over the past year, we've been adding much more original content, regular columns, weekly projects, guest authors, and special programs. And then there are our regular Weekend Project podcasts, and special videos, like Collin Cunningham's MAKE Presents series, and Marc de Vinck's how-to and kit build videos. There's a lot going on here, so we hope you're getting your daily dose of MAKE from us. If there's anything else you'd like to see us do here to satisfy your MAKE fix, please let us know. We're always looking for ways to expand and improve the site.

From the pages of MAKE:

Want to know how to build a hydrogen rocket? How about a laser light show in a lunchbox? Or a simple remote-controlled videocam car? Or maybe you want to go old-school and build a wooden mini sailboat or toy car launcher? All this and tons more, plus revealing photos of Adam Savage's maker childhood, can all be found in MAKE, Volume 20, "For Kids of All Ages." Get your individual copy in the Maker Shed, or subscribe now.

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Dan Jones writes "Google has open sourced several of its key JavaScript application development tools, hoping that they will prove useful for external programmers to build faster Web applications. According to Google, by enabling and allowing developers to use the same tools that Google uses, they can not only build rich applications but also make the Web really fast. The Closure JavaScript compiler and library are used as the standard Javascript library for pretty much any large, public Web application that Google is serving today, including some of its most popular Web applications, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. Google has also released Closure Templates which are designed to automate the dynamic creation of HTML. The announcement comes a few months after Google released and open sourced the NX server."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our pals at the Webbys just beta-launched Netted, an email list that provides one useful Web tip per day. Reminds me of Mark F's book Rule The Web. In the Netted alpha test: a service that sends snail mail postcards with any photo you upload, a guide to the best rooms in various hotels, and visual maps of automated phone menus for 500 US companies. All neat, and all new to me. Sign up here.

I'm in the Detroit area this week, exploring plans for a Maker Faire here next summer. I've been spending most of the time at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, a treasure-trove of American making.

On Saturday, I'll be stopping by the new hacker/maker space called I3 Detroit in Royal Oaks, MI. I'll be there from around 11 am to 1pm (give or take a half-hour). If you are a maker in the area, and don't mind giving up some time that you might otherwise spend on your favorite project, please drop by I3 Detroit and share your thoughts on doing a Maker Faire in the Detroit area. I am always looking to discover new makers and learn more about cool projects -- at home, in schools, or even at work. I am also proud to talk about our new "kids of all ages" issue.

I3 Detroit is located at 322 East Fourth Street, Royal Oaks, MI.

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The pendulum on the entertainment industry's push to have countries force ISPs to kick accused (not convicted) file sharers offline via a "three strikes" policy keeps swinging back and forth. While there was some capitulation recently, with the EU Parliament group that was negotiating with the EU Commission agreeing to remove the clause claiming that internet access was a human right, Hephaestus was the first of a few of you to send in word that negotiations have moved back a bit in the other direction. The new agreed upon text says that internet access is a human right, and that anyone should have the right to defend themselves against being kicked off the internet. But... (and it's a big one) if internet access is such a human right, why should anyone ever need to defend themselves? That's because the new text doesn't really mean what it says. It will still allow countries to force ISPs to kick people off the internet without judicial review. The only thing it adds is that people will be able to appeal after the fact. That's really not that helpful.

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brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I can't seem to find a way to describe these "link mugs" without venturing into uncomfortable sexual metaphors, so I'll just let the photos speak for themselves. So you can, you know, carry a bunch of them at once. [via Slippery Brick]

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The website of illustrator Allan Sanders. Fantastic aesthetic. (via)

Our very own Michelle Hlubinka, MAKE's Educational Director, is quoted in this Daily Californian piece about the celebtrational insanity of Russell Street, in San Francisco, known for it's elaborate decorations and large, costumed crowds.

Below is one of the yard decorations Michelle's family put together. Their theme was "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." I love the Dixie cups for monster teeth.

Halloween Revelers Flock to Russell Street

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bonch writes "Contrary to previous reports, Atom chip support is working fine in the latest 10C535 build of OS X 10.6.2. Apple's EULA still states that OS X is licensed to run only on Apple hardware, but it looks like OSX86 hackers can breathe easy ... for now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier today, we wrote about how even the MPAA's own members have shown they don't need to break your TV and DVR with selectable output control in order to release video-on-demand movies prior to DVD releases. Yet, if you hadn't noticed, the MPAA has been on a big rampage lately insisting that they need to do this to add yet another window to its release schedule. That's because the way Hollywood thinks is that they only way to make money is to take away what consumers want and, instead, add more annoying "windows." This is faulty thinking. However, it's even more faulty to claim that they need to break your TV and DVR to release this content. The MPAA's basic argument is that without this, there will be piracy -- but even the MPAA admits that every movie is pirated by the time it's in the theaters (i.e., before it would need this window).

Want to know why the MPAA got 60 Minutes to run its propaganda piece on movie piracy this week? Because it knew this fight was close to a deciding point, and a little moral panic might help tip it over the edge into Hollywood's favor.

For a while, the FCC has pushed back and refused to grant the movie studios an exemption in order to break your TV, but word is coming down that, despite promises to make decisions based on "evidence," the FCC is ready to give in and let the MPAA break your TV and DVR in order to stop you from recording the movies it releases. Why? There's no good reason at all, other than the administration's cozy relationship with Hollywood these days. The industry's own actions show that this will do nothing to make it easier for it to release movies earlier. The industry's own claims show that it will do nothing to decrease piracy.

The only thing it will do is harm millions of consumers who believe their TV and DVR should work the way they were intended to work.

Public Knowledge is asking people to send a letter to the FCC, protesting this decision. I'm not a fan of "form letters," but I would suggest reading over the suggested letter and then crafting your own (polite, well argued) version, and sending it to the FCC. Hopefully the FCC realizes that breaking your TV and DVR for the sake of protecting Hollywood's billions (which still continue to go up) is not progress. It's a blatant attempt to take away consumer rights.

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Designer toy photographer Brian McCarty shot this lovely portrait of Hello Kitty. The piece is titled "Three Apples," which according to Ms. Kitty's bio is her weight. Brian writes:

Truly an icon for the time, (Hello Kitty) is a totem and emblem of kinship for devotees of cute. With this realization, it was easy to take another step and cast Hello Kitty not just as a revered symbol, but also as a god.

Young Julia Coburn is seen in a desperate (albeit cute) state, floating away under a canopy of balloons. As Hello Kitty looks on, it's purposely unclear as to what role she plays...or will play in Julia's survival.

Hello Kitty "Three Apples"

I knew that more economic development tends to mean smaller families, and I knew that people were having fewer children in many developing countries. But I hadn't grasped how quickly that shift was happening until I read this comparison from last Thursday's issue of The Economist:

The transition from a [birth] rate of five [births per woman] to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain--from 1800 to 1930--took just 20 years--from 1965 to 1985--in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006--and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

But, while it's easy to assume that slowing population growth means a more sustainable future, it's not really as cut and dry as all that. Like The Economist points out: With development, you also get more people living the fossil-fuel heavy American lifestyle. Their argument: The problem of creating a sustainable future isn't really tied to birth rate. That's taking care of itself and couldn't go much faster without China-like impositions on personal freedom. Instead, the focus needs to be on the technology and policies that will help those children grow up in sustainable, energy efficient societies.

The Economist--"Demography, Growth and the Environment", via Follow the Energy blog.

Fabio Viale makes incredible marble sculptures that appear to be made of foam. No description of the build process is included, however I assume that it includes a healthy dose of elbow grease. [via kottke]

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Guido Núñez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela who is an avid gamer, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

After the jump, Núñez-Mujica's essay in full.

---

Last Thursday in Venezuela, a new law criminalizing "violent" video games and toys was approved by the National Assembly.

The law scapegoats gamers for the obscene levels of violence in our country (see below), and goes to extraordinary lengths to criminalize gaming, to the point of holding out long jail terms to people who buy the wrong kinds of games.

It's no joke. Last year, on a trip to the US, I was able to buy a Nintendo DS for my brother, and a puzzle game that deals with using weapons to defend the fish stock of penguins in Antarctica, Defendin' de Penguin. Early next year, when the law kicks in, bring such a game could land me in jail for 3 to 5 years, for importing forbidden violent games, as the penguins use snowball guns to ward off walruses, foxes (in Antarctica? OMG think of Biogeography!), polar bears and the Yeti.

The law is just the latest nail in the coffin of Venezuelans' right of dissent and broader civil liberties. A pitiful attempt to blame video games and toys for the widespread lethal violence in our country, instead of a defective judicial structure, systemic corruption and governmental (purposeful?) ineptitude to deal with the problem.

I am 26 years old. Ever since I can remember Venezuela has been a very dangerous place. Every year the body count seemed to climb higher than the previous year. Being on the streets after dark, especially in the big cities, became a little bit more dangerous with each passing year, no matter who was in power or how high prices for our oil rose.

I believed it was just a fact of life. Then, ten years ago, Hugo Chávez came to power promising change at every level, promising a new, less corrupt, wealthier, safer society. Most of my friends and family voted for him, to register their contempt for our traditional politicians, because they wanted justice and a decent country.

Ten years later, we are indeed wealthier, thanks to a feverish oil boom, but the country's also falling deeper into debt, issuing bonds and getting loans even from the despised Capitalist tool that is the IMF, and printing money like there's no tomorrow, while our electric system collapses, many staples are hard to find on store shelves, our hospitals are rotting and corruption and crime are still getting worse.

The official position is that crime is a byproduct of poverty and inequality. The official numbers say that poverty and inequality have decreased dramatically so, how is it possible that today we have one of the worst crime rates in the entire world? Our murder rates are among the top five in the world. Barinas, the rural State where Chávez is from and where his brother is governor, has the highest kidnapping rate in the world. (The governor's reply? People are kidnapping themselves to make the government look bad.) And if you live in Caracas today, you are at substantially higher risk of meeting a violent death than if you live in Iraq these days.

One thing is clear: either crime is not caused merely by poverty and inequality, as the murder rates in Bangladesh seem to confirm, or the government has not reduced poverty and inequality as much as it claims (as a glance to the barrios of Caracas seems to confirm). Or perhaps both.

Either way, the government has proven grossly incompetent at protecting its citizens. The pseudo-socialist clique that governs us plainly cares much more about protecting its own members. Recent press reports show that more cops in Caracas are devoted to protecting politicians and their families as body guards than to roaming the streets, and let's not even talk about crimes carried out by the police. Amid all this, the authorities seem to spend what limited resources are at the justice system's disposal on criminalizing dissent.

Venezuelan chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega has repeatedly argued that having the wrong opinion (a.k.a. "publishing information that may destabilize the government" or "causing a perception of impunity through the press") should be made a crime punishable with 10 years in jail. After recent protests, she has put student protesters in our worse jails because they spray-painted walls, and detained dozens labor movement protestors without trial for months on end for what amount to political crimes.

While Venezuela burns, our authorities are busy criminalizing those who protest, rather than those setting the fires.

Let's put this in perspective. Last year, we had almost 14,000 deaths due to crime, out of a population of about 27 million people. Let's round it up to 28 million, and make some calculations: If Bangladesh had our murder rate, there would be 125,000 murder victims there every year, if the US had our murder rate, we would be talking about 150,000 deaths due to crime, if Japan had our problem, there would be 60000 Japanese dead due to crime every time our pretty planet goes around the sun. If China and India had our levels of violence, we would get rid of 1,100,000 people every year.

The numbers of death due to violence do not seem so big in Venezuela due to our smallish population, but this a serious problem that is only getting worse after almost 11 years of Bolivarian rule. The number of people mugged, assaulted and robbed are much greater than that. Some relatives of mine have been shot and stabbed, most of my friends have been robbed at least once, and I had to jump from a bus in motion to avoid being robbed a month ago, in Mérida, where I live, a university town that not so long ago used to be relatively safe. In Valera, where my parents live, it is unwise to go out after 9 in the streets, and after 8:30, it gets really difficult to find public transportation.

So, will the government correct its strategy, accept that we have a huge problem that has to be solved ASAP and will follow its rhetoric and work along the communities to tackle crime (Death penalty and traditional top-down approaches won't work)?

No. Instead, it will blame the gamers for the problem.

Yes, we are to blame, because we cannot tell fantasy from reality and because video games make us violent, morons who will throw people out of cars just like in Grand Theft Auto and kill them, because even though games come with ratings, just like movies, I, an adult citizen, cannot be trusted to use them wisely.

This law makes selling video games to anybody actually worse than giving real guns or cigarettes to a minor, or even forcing him or her to work, as you get less jail time and lower fines if you do any of those things.

I have to be protected from them, so I don't go into a killing spree. (If I were so impressionable, I would not be writing this, I would have swallowed completely the huge amount of propaganda they feed to us). Our Parliament, instead of addressing our real needs, behaves like the bunch of escapist, authoritarian demagogues they are, imposing their decrees on us, because they are know they are right, and those of us who dissent, surely are rich elitist bastards who hate the poor, traitors who hate Venezuela and work for sinister, evil and shady foreign powers (If you follow American politics, this attitude should ring some alarms to you).

Surely a government that calls itself Socialist would have corrected a gross mistake by previous administrations: our marginal tax rate for the richest citizens is 34%, which is less than what the American marginal tax rate was when Bush gave tax cuts to Donald Trump and Warren Buffet. One would think that after ten years of Socialist government focused on the poor and against the evil rich, the fiercely egalitarian Venezuelan MPs would have found the time to increase the taxes of the hated rich to the same level of such boring, bland, flavorless, countries as Finland, New Zealand, Sweden or Canada.

Instead, they have been too busy forbidding video games, porn (2 to 6 years in jail for filming porn, as it goes against "good customs" and family) and human genetic engineering (The law is written in such an imprecise language than creating Human Recombinant Insulin could lead me to jail), while our president befriends murderers, genocides, golpistas (coup makers, like Gambia's president Yahya Jammeh), and tyrants and replicas of the sword of Bolívar, The Liberator.

Our president also claims that despite shutting down 34 opposition radio stations based on administrative technicalities, despite the constant harassment of dissident cable stations, and criminalizing of protests, this is the country with most Freedom of Speech in the whole world, the same thing that Silvio Scumbag Berlusconi said about Italy and pretty much what American jingoists, immune to facts love to say, "America is the Freest Country in The World", despite America's sickening incarceration rates and its aversion to cognitive liberty.

Venezuelan authorities' record on cognitive freedom is also laughable, with our authorities making wild claims about super marijuana (provided by the evil Colombians) that causes Alzheimer, and banning Family Guy from the air because it promotes the evil liberal American attitudes to drugs.

Most likely, not that many people will end up in jail due to the anti-gaming law. But it could easily be used to coerce, to extort and to pressure people who find themselves on the revolution's shit list, to make you feel powerless, like a criminal, to make you ashamed and scared.

Laws here get enforced selectively, but when the government issues so many laws criminalizing so many behaviours, sooner or later you are going to break one, so you better be well behaved and, above all, you better not criticize the powerful. If you do, they'll go through your hobbies... and when they do, they're bound to use something they can use against you.

Another possibilities is that they may be trying to target cybercafés and Internet services for those who lack net connection at home, as Counter Strike and other on-line games are a big source of revenues for cybercafés. In any case, even if individuals don't go to jail, stores won't sell games anymore.

Whichever explanation you favor, what we have here is just another brick in the wall, another piece of a strategy to slowly but surely build a legal wall against political dissent, even as our society goes to the dogs.

This situation is painful to behold. Even if I barely game at all these days, I am a gamer at neocortex. I spent countless hours solving puzzles, riddles and fighting monsters in dungeons. I rescued Toadstool many times, only to be told that thanks, but my Princess was in another castle, later I joined Link and rescued Zelda from Agahnim and Ganon, using the Master Sword and the Silver Arrows. I got the Zantetsu sword and cut metal, I summoned Ifrit, Odeen and Behemoth. From Dragoon, I became a Paladin. I sneaked on Big Boss' fortress in Zanzibar and stopped doomsday with Solid Snake. I fought along a Double Dragon trapped on a Final Fight, using my Killer Instinct in a Mortal Kombat in which only the greatest Street Fighter would come alive. I was Linked to the Past by a Chrono Trigger, my Soul Blazing, as I lived my Final Fantasies, Wandering from Ys, arriving to a Lagoon, to learn about the Secret of Mana, and finally understood that there is Ever More to life.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

Even if my parents could afford to buy a NES or a SNES when the times were good for us, we could not afford to buy games, so I played Mario a lot. I used to go to game parlors and play, made friends there, speaking not only about swords and crystals, combo breakers and special attacks, but also about AI, the future and technology, about that mysterious thing called the Internet (I met a girl who tried Compuserve!) and about nuclear war.

Fifteen years later, my little brother lives in a world where the scarcity of games can be bypassed with the right tools, where mod chips and special cards allow him to emulate really old games on newer devices, where he needs to learn the basics about hacking if he wants to fully use his Nintendo DS.

Yesterday I was explaining to my little brother how any computer could in theory, emulate another computer, and how that made it possible to play really old games (Older than him!) on his DS. I was explaining what a terminal window and a program were and how I converted videos to a format that his DS can understand. And he was thrilled, his eyes lit with pleasure, technology was a bridge that got us closer. If we blindly follow the copyright and video game forbidding laws, we won't be able to do this anymore, and he will stop learning as much as he could gaming and hacking, finding his way to talk to machines to get them to do what he needs.

But I won't obey, I will be an outlaw gamer, and I vow to teach him as much as I can and as much as he is willing to learn, as early as possible. I refuse to give up my rights to a government that is commanded by Vuitton clad jerks asking sacrifices from us, I refuse to stop gaming because a bunch of control freaks tell me that I will become a killer and that the wonderful games that enriched my childhood are psycho factories.

If I get fined for writing this (Article 13, promoting the use of violent videogames), so be it. If I go to jail because I carry rooms in my hard drive or in an R4 card for my brother, next time I return to the country, so be it. But I'd rather go to jail than betray the gamer culture, partially responsible for making me the person I am today.

Enough is enough, and I am fed with this government of morons, pretending to be socialist while living a luxurious lifestyle, paying very little taxes and plundering our oil money. This is a travesty, a pacifist government who gets loans from Russia to buy rifles, tanks and missiles, whose official motto is "Fatherland, Socialism or Death", whose leader calls other people subhuman, and constantly speaks about war. A socialist system that offers lower taxes than Bush for the rich people, that gives no-bid contracts to Chevron Texaco, a progressive govt. spreading lies about marijuana and promoting a new law that requires education on breastfeeding for our girls, but no education on reproductive freedoms, a system that promotes sovereignty and dignity micromanaging my life and telling what I have to do, what I cannot do and stepping on my rights to mind my business as long as I do not harm anybody else.

The only thing more puzzling to me than liberals being eager of supporting this, is that social conservatives hate him despite his strong family values, opposition against vice and low taxes for the rich.

Now, that games have been outlawed, I am an outlaw, but there is hope. My brother is learning that sometimes being an outlaw is the right thing to do, that some laws are not fair and must be opposed and that breaking the law does not makes you a bad person.

That is a hard thing to explain to a seven year old, but now he understands it really well. I do not know if he will ever become a hacker, but he is already a rebel and a happy mutant.

More links about the situation in Venezuela:

• Caracas Chronicles

• The Devil's Excrement

• Venezuela-Europa

• El Libertario (In Spanish, Anarchist News)

• Radar De Los Barrios (In Spanish, complains from the people living in the slums)

New research suggests that the atmosphere can be modeled with fractal patterns and may not be as, er, complex as we thought. The benefit of the new knowledge? Perhaps more accurate forecasts and better climate models. From New Scientist:

The results point to a new view of the atmosphere as a vast collection of cascade-like processes, with large structures the size of continents breaking down to feed ever-smaller ones, right down to zephyrs of air no bigger than a fly.

The implications promise to transform the way we predict everything from tomorrow's local weather to the changing climate of the entire planet. "We may never be able to view the atmosphere and climate in the same way again," says team member Shaun Lovejoy of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "Rather than seeing them as so complex that only equally complex numerical models can make sense of them, we're seeing a kind of scale-by-scale simplicity."

"Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals" (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)

An anonymous reader writes 'In comparison to the advanced technology in today's smart phones, the standard home phone is painfully backwards. My current setup is a Panasonic system that has 4 cordless phones over one base station. Setting the time on one phone changes the time on all the phones; however, this is not the case for the phone book. Each entry must be manually copied (pushed) to each handset. Is this as far as home phone technology has come? What I would like is a phone system that I could sync to my computer so I could update the phone book over all the units (if not sync with Address Book or Outlook), keep a log of caller IDs, or even forward me new voicemail notifications. Does anyone know if such a system exists?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past how silly it is for countries to have "crown copyright" (basically granting the government copyright over government documents). Luckily, the US has no such thing, but it makes no sense elsewhere. The government doesn't need copyright incentives to create works. The only purpose crown copyright can serve is for the sake of censorship. Canada has a perfect example of that, as the Auditor General issued a takedown to both The Globe and Mail and Scribd, for posting one section of the Auditor General's report on immigration. The Auditor General claims that to post parts of her report, newspapers (and others) need to ask permission on a case-by-case basis, due to the copyright. Of course, The Globe and Mail is a newspaper, and posted it as part of its reporting -- which should be clear fair use/fair dealing (even if there was copyright over this material -- which there shouldn't be). And yet, we keep being told that Canada's copyright laws are too lenient?

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My friend Tod Kurt and I finished building our laser tripwire art heist! (He did all the heavy lifting.) This is for the Machine Project Benefit this Saturday night. Here's a sneak peek:

We're using a hazer to make the laser beams visible, which works surprisingly well in this semi-open space. To increase the spectacle we installed a few extra lasers that are not being sensed for tripwires, but just look cool. The heisters won't know which these are, however, so it adds to the challenge without increasing complexity.

In this side view you can see what happens when you break too many beams: lots of lights come on, including a blinding, red LED array. For this Tod used an Arduino-controlled AC optical relay. I'm hoping Tod will write up the whole project for a MAKE article, because he has all kinds of neat tricks like this throughout.

The event is shaping up to be truly wonderful, and affords the attendee a rare chance to hang out in Mister Jalopy's secret underground lair. I'm totally shameless, so if you ask I'll eat some laser for you. There are still a few tickets available, hope to see you there!

Related:
Laser tripwires for Machine Project art heist
Machine Project Benefit 2009

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The God machine just can't catch a break...

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

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Michael Simmons of Fretboard Journal says: "Here's an interesting video from olden times [1964] featuring a song called 'Teenage Fallout Queen.' And there's this site devoted to Cold War pop music."

(I love the lettering in the title at the beginning!)

I love this. Instructables user wholman has gathered together a bunch of scrap wood from "dumpsters, back alleys, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, recycling yards, and architectural salvage centers" and laminated it together using all-thread. Then he's very carefully smoothed and polished only one side of the finished block, leaving the underside rough to show off the process. Beautiful.

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Matt_dk writes "Just one week after the first test flight test of the Ares I-X rocket, NASA says it may decide to cancel a follow-up launch called Ares 1-Y, which wasn't scheduled until 2014. Reportedly, program managers recommended dropping the flight because, currently, there isn't the funding to get an upper stage engine ready in time. Depending on whether the Obama administration decides to continue the Ares I program, this decision may be moot. Earlier this week Sen. Bill Nelson said Obama may make a decision on NASA's future path, based on the report by the Augustine Commission, by the end of November."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A woman named Alice, 59, had morning sex with her husband but immediately after, she was hit with amnesia. According to a CNN story, Alice experienced transient global amnesia, complete loss of short-term memory and some problems recalling older events too. Apparently, the curious condition can be triggered by a variety of vigorous exercise, sudden and drastic temperature change, or emotional trauma. Transient Global Amnesia can resolve itself quickly and usually doesn't leave any permanent damage. Alice's memory returned by the afternoon. CNN presented Alice's case and spoke with Harvard neurology professor Louis Caplan about the causes of transient global amnesia. From CNN:

"(Sex) is actually a well-known precipitator. One of the things people have done to look at transient global amnesia is to look at frequency of various precipitants and sex always comes out as one of the most common," said Caplan, a leading stroke expert at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not associated with Alice's care. "It usually is after climax that it develops," he said about its onset...

In 1999, Johns Hopkins University doctors described two patients in their 70s who suffered TGA after having sex. In these cases, the act of "bearing down" -- which occurs when people move their bowels, give birth or have sex -- created pressure in the brain's blood vessels, resulting in temporary lack of blood flow that caused amnesia, according to the study published in The Lancet...

Caplan likened the hippocampus, which is responsible for short-term memory in the brain, to a tape recorder. If blood flow to the brain gets restricted, the hippocampus cannot record new memory.

"The hippocampus is responsible for initially recording the information so you can play it back," he said. "So if it's not working, you won't get the information."

"Sex, then amnesia...and it's no soap opera"

Luke Iseman sells a Bicycle Defense Kit for $19.90.

The Bicycle Defense Kit (BDK) offers options for dealing with aggressive motorists. Contained within an altoids tin, the 8 tools vary in detectability, potential to cause damage, and legality.

Specifically, cyclists can:

• Issue "citizen citations" with official-ish tickets.
• Label offending vehicles with an "I was a jerk to a cyclist" sticker.
• Introduce the risk of paint damage with a Jolly Rancher.
• Create certain coating cremation via DOT3 brake fluid.
• Make cars stink worse than their exhaust with a carefully-placed stink bomb.
• Throw a trusty bolt to dent offending traffic as it passes.
• Lock out loony drivers by filling their keyholes with super glue.
• Cut through tire valve stems with a utility blade.

Bicycle Defense Kit

Via Adam Savage, I heard about a fun project that highlights the advertising is content, content is advertising concept in multiple ways. It's a site called ILoveLocalCommercials.com, which features two filmmakers going around the country making (free -- and awesome) TV commercials for local businesses that are nominated on the site. As mentioned, the commercials are really quite impressive, such as the "brutally honest" commercial for Cullman Liquidation ("get yourself a home, or don't, I don't care") or for Ray's Midbell Music that involves a rap about how being in the school band is cool:

The commercials are really entertaining in their own way, and have garnered hundreds of thousands of views -- again, demonstrating how good advertising is content. The guys making the videos also put up a short "behind the scenes" version of each video as well, to explain the backstory a bit more. The backstory on Cullman Liquidation is pretty entertaining as well.

But why are these guys doing this? Well, the whole thing is actually part of a promotion from another company, MicroBilt, that's trying to promote its own line of small business services. So it's paying for the whole thing -- showing how content is advertising. None of the videos are actually about MicroBilt, but in sponsoring the entire site and the whole process, it's helping to get its name out there in a fun (non-intrusive, non-annoying, non-sneaky) manner. It's not about product placement or trying to "sneak" a brand into something. Everything's totally upfront. But it's a fun project, with highly entertaining content that shows both how advertising is content and how content is advertising.

Oh yeah, and it appears that Cullman Liquidation has also picked up on the whole "looooooooooots of t-shirts" concept. On the Cullman Liquidation website, the company is selling t-shirts based on the commercial...

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Here are photos of a bear that has lost her fur, save a few tufts around her head. All the female bears at the Leipzig zoo suffer this humiliating affliction. (I think the CIA, which associates bears with communism, sprinkled thallium salts on their paws to cause their fur to fall out.)

Vets baffled by bald bears with mystery condition

At the intersection of art, science, and mystery lies the Linder Gallery Interior, a 17th century painting depicting a gallery filled with scientific instruments, mathematical and cosmic diagrams, a variety of Flemish, Dutch, and Italian paintings, and a curious collection of other objects. Apparently, it represents the controversial ideas that came to a head in Galileo’s 1633 Inquisition Trial. Once owned by the Rothschilds and swiped by the Nazis, the painting is now in a private New York City collection. Fortunately for us, Michael John Gorman, curator of the Trinity College Dublin's Science Gallery, became obsessed with the artwork and created a Web site and book, titled "A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery." From the site:

Who is the old man? What’s his relationship with the woman, who holds paintbrushes and a palette? What is the significance of the paintings on the walls? Are we looking at a real or imaginary collection of objects? What about the very carefully painted scientific instruments? What is the significance of the books on the green table? Why is there a drawing of the different possible systems of the universe in the centre of the painting with the intriguing Latin phrase “ALY ET ALIA VIDENT” – “Others see it yet otherwise”?

After the jump, a video of Gorman giving a 5 minute Ignite talk about about the Linder Gallery Interior and his quest to understand it.

A Mysterious Masterpiece (Science Gallery)

"A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery" (Amazon)

Trinity writes "Researchers from VUPEN have discovered critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Shockwave, a technology installed on over 450 million Internet-enabled desktops. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution by tricking a user into visiting a web page using Internet Explorer or even Mozilla Firefox. Version 11.5.1.601 as well as earlier ones are affected. The vendor recommends upgrading to version 11.5.1.602." Especially sobering when you consider Adobe's current push to be essentially required as an intermediary player for anyone who wants to see certain government data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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 of you might remember a story about a little boy and a runaway balloon that erupted in the news a few weeks back. Like Edgar Allan Poe's 1844 scoop about Monck Mason, an English balloonist who was blown off course en route to France and made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina (illustration above), the story turned out to be false in most of its particulars. There really was an aeronautist named Monck Mason, but he hadn't crossed the ocean. There really was a little boy and a UFO-shaped balloon, but... well, you know the rest.

A few days after Balloon Boy's non-event The Yes Men, professional hoaxers with a genuine political agenda, pulled off a coup when they impersonated officials from the US Chamber of Commerce and announced to the press that the Chamber had reversed its policies on global warming. I wrote about the Yes Men in Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies in the context of the bizarre nineteenth century hoaxer Leo Taxil. Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages (1854-1907), an ex-free thinker and a highly public convert to Catholicism who, in a series of sensational books, claimed to have discovered Palladism, a devil-worshipping Masonic sect associated with Albert Pike and the Scottish Rite. In 1897, he called a press conference in Paris and admitted that he had made the whole thing up. Not just Palladism, everything-starting with his conversion. For more than a decade, he had been telling the Catholic Church exactly what it wanted to hear, setting it up for a stupendous fall when "the most colossal hoax of modern times" was exposed. Already a prankster as a teenager, Taxil had created a panic about fictitious shark attacks in the waters off Marseilles (shark attacks remain a staple of the sensationalistic media to this day); a few years later he fed Swiss newspapers a bogus story about a sunken city beneath Lake Geneva.

Are there wider lessons to be gleaned from any of this, besides not believing everything you read in the newspaper (or hear on the radio, watch on TV, or read on the Web)?

Frank Rich editorialized about Balloon Boy's father in the New York Times, casting him as a desperate figure out of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, a victim of our own Great Recession, hungrily grasping after the golden ring of wealth and fame. If West's people worshipped screen gods and goddesses, today's stage struck wannabes aspire to play themselves on TV, living out scripted versions of their own lives.

Mass communications technology and a popular culture that's almost entirely given over to marketing have conspired to devalue the coin of renown. But is that such a terrible thing? Celebrity of the sort that Falcon Heene's father wanted so badly might be vulgar and passing, but who among us hasn't longed to rise above our station, to be noticed and praised and remembered for merely existing; who hasn't longed to cheat death?
The Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš (who died of cancer in his 50s) wrote a short story called "The Encyclopedia of the Dead," about a Mormon-like religious order that documents the lives of ordinary people. Locked overnight in the library that houses the Encyclopedia's thousands of volumes, its narrator reads about her recently deceased father. Though just a few pages long, his entry recounts in astounding detail not just his vital statistics, but all of his sorrows, disappointments, and joys, rendering him in all his dense and irreducible pathos and particularity. "This," she concludes, "is the central message of the Encyclopedia's authors--nothing ever repeats itself in human history; all things that, at first glance, seem to be the same are barely similar; every man is a single star unto himself; everything happens always and never, everything occurs endlessly and never again."

Sometimes when I'm too agitated to sleep but too sleepy to read or write or do anything useful, I log onto my computer and Google the names of people I used to know. It sounds a little creepy, but it's not as if I wouldn't have been thinking about them anyway. Insomnia is an occasion for revisiting old griefs and regrets. If you want to hear the dead scratching on the walls of their tombs, you have to stay up past your bedtime.
I went to high school with a musician who came as close to making it as you can without becoming rich or famous. One night, I don't know why, I typed the name of one of his bands into Google and to my astonishment discovered that fan websites, MP3s, and YouTube videos had popped up like so many mushrooms. I clicked on one of them and there he was, his eyes hidden behind a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, his face achingly young and hopeful. I clicked again and saw some grainy concert footage recorded in Osaka, Japan. He was older this time, and grizzled from the road. The singer he was performing with--a bonafide rock-and-roll legend--would die of a heroin overdose that same month. Jamey would follow him a few years later.

I Googled my late father's father once and found the manifest of the steamship that brought him to this country from Poland at the turn of the last century. I Googled my father's sister--she killed herself in the 1960s--and found her listed as a member of Erasmus high school's graduating class of 1931. Letters that my late mother sent to Harpers magazine and The New York Times are archived and can be accessed for a nominal fee.
"In the future," Andy Warhol famously predicted, "everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Fifteen minutes later the future is here. And thanks to the indelible traces that we leave on the Internet, some of us achieve a notoriety of the kind, if not the degree, that used to be reserved for the notorious alone. Religious faith might offer deeper consolations, but for the rest of us those fifteen minutes might be our last best hope.

Ever wished that when you play air guitar, it would make real sounds instead of just the ones from your best death metal face? David Fournier, Jean-Louis Giordano, Monireh Sanaei, Maziar Shelbaf and Gustav Sohtell are here to help. They build the AIRduino guitar, a wearable virtual instrument. Open source with full documentation, naturally. [via Fashioning Technology]

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For a while now, the MPAA and the major movie studios have been asking the FCC for permission to break your TV and DVR by enabling "selectable output control," which would block the recording of certain movies. The MPAA's claim for why they needed this is to add another "window" for releasing movies as video on demand prior to them being released on DVD. But that makes no sense. As we pointed out, when they first made this claim, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from releasing these movies earlier for VOD. There's nothing to stop them from doing so -- and it's not like SOC would actually block the movies from being online. Every movie ends up online around the same time (usually before) it gets into the theaters, so these movies would all be available for file sharing prior to the VOD release anyway. The MPAA keeps saying that it simply can't release the movies earlier without this form of DRM, but it appears that the studios own actions prove that we were right, and the MPAA was lying. Public Knowledge is pointing out that Warner Bros. has released two recent movies for VOD prior to DVD, even as the MPAA is still insisting that it's simply impossible. Oops.

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You might have seen that the EU's "Telecoms Package" squeaked through with some protection for users' rights intact -- specifically, the proposal to allow "3-strikes" rules (whereby everyone in your house would lose internet access if any member was accused, without trial, of copyright infringement) was killed. But it's not as good as it could be, nor as good as it was before the content industry's lobbyists got their chums to rewrite it.

Jérémie Zimmemrmann writes,

The European Parliament and the Council of the EU came to an agreement on the "Telecoms Package" negotiations. They laid down legal and procedural guarantees against restrictions of Internet access. The new provision gives[1] "effective judicial protection and due process", guarantees "the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy" and the respect of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

However, the text only speaks of "a prior fair and impartial procedure" instead of a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, guaranteed by the original "amendment 138", and contains loopholes and ambiguities. The invalidation of freedom-killer measures such as "three strikes policies" will now depend on interpretation by the European Court of Justice and national courts. Moreover, the text only relates to measures taken by Member States and thereby fails to bar telecom operators and entertainment industries from knocking down the founding principle of Net neutrality.

Europe only goes half-way in protecting Internet rights.

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Ian writes in:

I was looking at buying a digital camera, and read that there are two kinds of sensors that they can use to take a picture- CMOS and CCD. Can you tell me what the difference is, and if one is better to get?

Sure! It's actually a pretty topical question, as the inventors of the CCD just won this year's Nobel Prize! As you mentioned, there are two basic kinds of image sensor that are used in today's digital cameras, CCD (charge-coupled device) and CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor). They both work by converting light energy (photons) into electric charge (electrons), and the difference is in how this charge is read out.

To start, both kinds of sensor are made of a grid of 'buckets' placed evenly across a flat semiconductor surface. Each bucket acts as an individual sensor, which only sees a tiny portion of the image. By displaying a bunch of these tiny points in a grid (using a computer monitor or printer), we see the image.

Making color images is a bit more complicated. Because the buckets are sensitive to any wavelength of visible light, if we just looked at the results we would see a monochrome image. To get color information, we arrange the sensors into groups of four, and place tiny red, green, and blue color filters over them. Each group of four sensors is what we call a pixel, and it is interesting to note that modern cameras have millions of them.

Ok, so both CCD and CMOS sensors are basically just big arrays of individual sensors, so how are they different? The difference is in how the charges are collected and read out. In a CCD, the 'bucket' that collects charge is just a capacitor. To read the image data out of the CCD, the charge in each bucket is pumped individually over to an ADC (analog to digital converter), which actually measures charge. In a CMOS sensor, each bucket contains a photodiode and some amplifier circuitry. To read the image data out, the output of each amplifier is connected to an ADC through a multiplexer, which measures the voltage at each cell.

I don't think that either technology is necessarily better, but each has its own quirks. There is an interesting site at dvxuser which talks about the different kinds of sensor artifacts associated with each kind of sensor. For most cases, though, I think that other specifications, such as ease of use and sensitivity to light, are probably more important to think about when choosing a digital camera. Good luck!

[photo by SarahCartwright]

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recoiledsnake writes "A few years after the Con Kolivas fiasco, the FatELF project to implement the 'universal binaries' feature for Linux that allows a single binary file to run on multiple hardware platforms has been grounded. Ryan C. Gordon, who has ported a number of popular games and game servers to Linux, has this to say: 'It looks like the Linux kernel maintainers are frowning on the FatELF patches. Some got the idea and disagreed, some didn't seem to hear what I was saying, and some showed up just to be rude.' The launch of the project was recently discussed here. The FatELF project page and FAQ are still up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joseph Scott has a post on the main WordPress site that explains that they are now supporting the two enhancements that were announced here on October 16.

What this means: Now any aggregator that wants instant updates of WordPress sites can have it. It was an issue for complex sites like Google Reader, that's why we enhanced our apps, so they could hook into rssCloud and provide instant updates to their users. If you use Google Reader or My Yahoo or Bloglines, tell them you want rssCloud support so you can get instant WordPress updates from sites like CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm (and of course) Scripting News!

WordPress also fixed a problem that could prevent RSS feeds from reflecting the change immediately. That was a problem because sometimes we'd receive notification that a feed had changed, and then would go read the feed only to find that it hadn't!

Many thanks, once again, to the great people at Automattic.

The jam band Phish came up with a list of 99 classic albums, one of which ("Exile on Main Street") they surprised an audience by covering in its entirety at a Halloween concert in Indio, California. As an intro for the Phish performance, London-based A/V remixers Eclectic Method took audio and video bits from each of those 99 albums and collaged them together into a superb cut-up. "Eclectic Method Goes Phish" (Thanks, Gabe "TuneUp" Adiv!)

Ars Technica covers the renaissance of Gopher, the text-based menuing system that presaged the Web. My first net-industry job was building a gopher site (halfway through, we scrapped it in favor of a website). Good times.

Cameron Kaiser is a programmer on the Overbite Project, which brings better Gopher support to Firefox versions 2 and 3. When he writes about the relevance of Gopher in a Web world, he rejects the nostalgia for a "simpler time."

"The misconception that the modern renaissance of Gopherspace is simply a reaction to 'Web overload' is unfortunately often repeated and, while superficially true, demonstrates a distinct lack of insight," he writes. Instead, Gopher's advantages lie in the structure that its simple menu-based interface imposes on content.

"Gopher is a mind-set on making structure out of chaos," says Kaiser. "Within Gopherspace, all Gophers work the same way and all Gophers organize themselves around similar menus and interface conceits. It is not only easy and fast to create Gopher content in this structured and organized way, it is mandatory by its nature. Resulting from this mandate is the ability for users to navigate every Gopher installation in the same way they navigated the one they came from, and the next one they will go to. Just like it had been envisioned by its creators, Gopher takes the strict hierarchical nature of a file tree or FTP and turns it into a friendlier format that still gives the fast and predictable responses that they would get by simply browsing their hard drive. As an important consequence, by divorcing interface from information, Gopher sites stand and shine on the strength of their content and not the glitz of their bling."

The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on

I suppose the people in Maine who voted against gay marriage will now organize to shut down the lobster industry, right?

The Mt. Holly Mayor found a stockpile of civil defense documents at an an estate sale. He uploaded this DIY "Family Shelter Designs" booklet published in 1962 by the U.S. Dept. of Defense. As a bonus, he linked to the fun 1983 Donald Fagan video about a hot date in a fallout shelter.

The New Frontier - Department of Defense Family Shelter Designs from 1962

Uncle Rummy writes "A central traffic control computer in Montgomery County, Maryland failed early Wednesday morning, leading to widespread gridlock across the entire county. The computer, which dates to the 1970s, is the single point of unified control for all traffic signals in the county, which comprises a number of major Washington DC-area suburban communities. When the system failed, it caused all signals to default to stand-alone operation, rather than the highly-tuned synchronization that usually serves to facilitate traffic flow during rush hours. The resulting chaos is a yet another stark reminder of how much modern civilization relies on behind-the-scenes automation to deliver and control basic services and infrastructure. The system remains down Thursday, with no ETA in sight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ACLU produced this video about men who were held at Guantánamo for years without charge then, after being tasered, suffocated, raped, punched, blinded, and spat upon, were released without charge. (Via The Agitator)

Ademir Jorge Goncalves showed up at his own funeral on Monday, after relatives incorrectly assumed that a disfigured body found in a car crash in Parana, southern Brazil, was his. Goncalves — a 59-year old bricklayer — had actually been out drinking cachaca with friends at a truck stop. Link

A Lithuanian designer team has made a series of edible, wearable bread shoes that can be purchased on their site. They seem like they'd be comfy house slippers. Bread Shoes via Dezeen

I've been trying not to respond to every RIAA blog post these days, but it's hard to let certain things go when they so rarely make any sense. For example, RIAA President Cary Sherman recently talked up the new regulations that force colleges and universities to "take proactive steps" to stop file sharing. He goes on to make it sound like universities decided to do this in the spirit of "teamwork" with the RIAA, rather than because they risked serious financial consequences under the law for not complying. He also leaves out the fact that tons of colleges and universities are pissed off and complaining about how much time, effort and money they're wasting on this just because Sherman and his friends still don't seem able to embrace modern music business models. Colleges and universities have enough to worry about without the government forcing them to act as the RIAA's police force. If it were truly about teamwork, Cary, you wouldn't have had to spend so much time getting Congress to pass a law to force them to do this.

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a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The battle was hard, but the final text of the agreement ensures that people in the EU are not disconnected from the Internet without a chance to get a fair and impartial hearing beforehand. The important part is: 'Accordingly, these measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned, subject to the need for appropriate conditions and procedural arrangements in duly substantiated cases of urgency in conformity with European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed.' This means that if someone is accused of copyright infringement, they can't just be disconnected from Internet. It lets the accused get a chance to disagree and take it to court first. The urgency clause means that a computer can be disconnected if it is part of an ongoing DDoS attack. Next, this has to be implemented into the EU nations' own laws, so the final ruling on how this will be implemented is not out yet. But, overall, it looks like a great success in stopping informal three-strikes disconnections."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a video showing Ford's new inflatable seat belts for rear seats.

Ford Motor Company is bringing to market the worlds first automotive inflatable seat belts, combining attributes of traditional seat belts and air bags to provide an added level of crash safety protection for rear seat occupants.

The advanced restraint system is designed to help reduce head, neck and chest injuries for rear seat passengers, often children and older passengers who can be more vulnerable to such injuries.

Ford will introduce inflatable rear seat belts on the next-generation Ford Explorer, which goes into production next year for the North American market. Over time, Ford plans to offer the technology in vehicles globally.

Inflatable rear seat belts

Sony has released firmware v1.10 for its DSLR-A380, DSLR-A330 and DSLR-A230 digital SLRs. The latest firmware for all three cameras locks exposure on the focused subject, when the metering mode is set to Center Weighted or Spot. The firmware is available for immediate download from Sony's website.

Interesting article in the Telegraph about "Argleton," a town that appears in Google maps but does not, apparently, exist in the real world. The best theory I've heard is that the town is a "trap" intended to catch those who steal map data. [Thanks, Glen!]

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The Wu-Note Project, by Logan Walters. Photoshop rules everything around me. (thanks, PJ)

jamie writes with news of a Facebook app developer who found a significant security hole while he was trying to get around function limitations for his application. Quoting: "Luckily — just with browser AJAX requests — a flash application hosted on domain X is unable to open a file on domain Y. If this would be possible, domain X [would be] able to access content on domain Y, and when the user is logged in on domain Y retrieve and post back any personal data. In certain cases this could limit a Flash application's capabilities. ... To resolve such issues, Adobe (Flash's developers) introduced a 'crossdomain.xml' file which could allow certain domains to access another domain, leading to cross-domain access by certain or all domains. While indeed Facebook locked the front door from any non-Facebook domain access via Flash, a simple subdomain change allowed any flash application (domain="*") to access its domain data." He found a similar problem in MySpace's crossdomain.xml. Both sites were notified, and they have implemented fixes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Karen O'Leary of North Carolina cuts paper by hand to create these stunning street maps of world cities. Above, her rendition of New York City. Here's her Etsy store. Blog coverage: The Best Part, Paper Tastebuds, infosthetics (via @leckart)

Update: Looks like The Jailbreak was the first blog to cover this, and they have an interview with the artist in an update post.

Bad Science Begets Ridiculous Results: A professor at Middle Tennessee State University thought his MBA students were cheaters. So, to deal with the problem, he had them sign a pledge...wherein they agreed that their immortal souls would go to hell if they'd ever cheated in his class. He claims he got the idea after reading about an academic study that showed students who read the 10 Commandments before an exam were less likely to cheat.

Anybody else might shrug off these ice spikes as a meaningless hiccup in the preparation of a frosty beverage, but not Lenore and Windell at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories!

Snowcrystals.com has a fairly detailed explanation of how these things form, and it's documented elsewhere as well. (Roughly speaking, supercooled water is pushed up through a hole, somewhat like magma forming a volcano.) It's relatively easy to form these in your freezer if you start with distilled water, but occasionally-- as in our case --they do occur with regular tap water.

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We've discussed in the past the odd idea that any government should be able to copyright anything it produces, but plenty of governments still do maintain things like "crown copyright" or other similar concepts for content they create. Yet, it looks like some countries have gone one step further. They copyright their money. Yes, Michael Scott points us to a blog post from an American law professor, Eric E. Johnson, who was on a trip to Canada and was surprised to discover that they have copyright notices on their paper currency. Of course, this should make you wonder: if you counterfeit some Canadian money are you also on the hook for copyright infringement violations? Or is there some other reason for the copyright notice. Are they afraid other nations might copy the design without compensation?

Finding the whole thing bizarre, but remembering that I have some Canadian currency from my last trip there, I checked -- and, indeed, in tiny print in the lower right-hand corner, there is a copyright notice. And then... bonus. Tucked in with my Canadian cash was a 5 euro bill as well... and it also appears to have a copyright notice on it right at the top in the center (though, it's tiny). I did a quick search, and indeed, it appears that the design of the euro is also covered by copyright with specific limitations on copying. Of course, I thought that was what counterfeiting laws were for -- so why even bother with copyright?

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Olympus has announced two Micro Four Thirds lenses and published an updated 'roadmap' of lenses it plans to introduce. The latest lenses are the M.Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 wideangle and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm F4.0-5.6 superzoom, both of which will be available in the first half of 2010. The roadmap mirrors aspects of the company's Four Thirds lineup, promising a fisheye, wideangle and telephoto macro primes and a super-telephoto zoom.

anomnomnomymous writes "Just a week after Unity announced its engine is now available for free to indie users, Epic Games has revealed a free version of its popular Unreal Engine technology. Called the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), it is a free edition of UE3 that allows community, modder and indie users more access to the engine's features and is available for all. Epic said game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations plus digital filmmakers can all take advantage of the UDK for non-commercial use. The UDK site also offers detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms and support resources."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The weather in Los Angeles is so predictable, weather reporter Mark Thompson from our local Fox affiliate can just play sexy rap music and dance the day's forecast. He is one of the many reasons I love living in Los Angeles. Here's one video. Here's another, and here's yet another. He has an awesome, manly-man voiceover voice. But I like him best when he's silent. As one non-LA YouTube commenter said, "I wish my weather channel played songs that said 'bitch please.'" (That'd be this one, at 1:42.) (via @eecue)

Steakhouse or Gay Bar: I could play this game for hours. (via @ronjon)

Burning wood in a cozy fireplace or wood stove: not so green, according to this NYT blog item. EPA reports there are 29 million wood-burning fireplaces in US households, most lose up to 90% of their heat up the chimney. And 75% of US wood-burning stoves pollute like crazy.

Bucc5062 writes "LaserMotive has achieved the first step towards the creation of a working space elevator by qualifying for the $900,000 prize in a contest sponsored by NASA. To achieve this first level, LaserMotive needed to propel a platform up a cable dangling from a helicopter at over 2 m/s. They hit a top speed of 4.13 m/s. The next level of qualification will be to achieve a climb speed greater then 5 m/s. LaserMotive beamed roughly 400 watts of laser power to a moving target at a distance of 1 kilometer, as part of the vertical laser alignment procedure. The target was a retro-reflective board a little larger than 1 meter on a side. The contest will continue for another two days with at least two other teams challenging for the prize. To win the Power Beaming competition, the LaserMotive system uses a high-power laser array to shine ultra-intense infrared light onto high-efficiency solar cells, converting the light into electric power which then drives a motor. 'Our system will track the vehicle as it climbs, compensating for motion due to wind and other changes. Building on our experience from last year’s competition, we are designing an improved system able to capture the full $2,000,000 prize.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Care to hand control of your playlist over you to an Arduino?

Awhile back I was working on a project that that I wanted to be able to start music the on my mac through the IR receiver. After a while of looking around I found this library  which allows you to use your arduino as an Apple Remote. I integrated it in to my project and it worked great! So the other day I decided to make an Apple Remote shield for my arduino.

Check computergeek's instructable for the step-by-step.

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The following is an update to this previous post. So here's another video gem from Supreme Master TV, uploaded and blogged by Robert Popper.

Why doesn't every television news network run stuff like what's in this clip? Say what you will about "God's Direct Contact," at least her broadcast devotees say thank you to journalists and photographers for doing all we do for "humans and animals," and "especially while on duty." I'd like to hope they think that what we do here at Boing Boing "uplifts the atmosphere of the world."

A number of Boing Boing readers responded to my earlier post with personal stories of (apparently quite tasty) meals eaten at the vegan restaurant chain owned by personality cult leader Supreme Master Ching Hai. But BB reader HiTek LoLife takes the tofu cake, with a personal anecdote re-blogged in full after the jump.

BB reader HiTek LoLife says,

My story about "Supreme Master's" crazy cult and restaurant:

They opened a restaurant in downtown San José on Santa Clara st. back maybe 15 yrs.(?) ago conveniently named "Supreme Master of Meditation Suma Ching Hai's International Vegetarian House Restaurant" (they were somehow able to fit all of that plus a picture of "Supreme Master" herself on a tiny awning over the door). The name has since been shortened but I used to love reciting it verbatim to folks as a vegetarian restaurant suggestion.

Anyway, when it first opened I dropped in on a whim one day and was treated to a giant screen indoctrination video of "Supreme Master" (pre blond bleach job) addressing a soccer stadium full of hapless minions while I enjoyed a reasonably good vegetarian meal in the otherwise empty dining room.

As she launched into some rant about being able to bring the "true beauty and peace of the world" into my life I heard shouting coming from the open window I was seated next to and was treated the spectacle of a drunken vagrant in the parking lot pissing himself while loudly fighting an invisible opponent.

Just as she raised her hand and said something like "Now feel the power of God!" he took a staggering dive and hit the pavement, (evidently K.O.d by his invisible opponent). He then lifted his head and puked profusely, stared down at his output and exclaimed "Now who the fuck did that?".

The last thing I remember her saying was something like "Remember that here today I have shown you God's beauty and power at work in the world".

The whole experience was just so perfectly synchronized for unintended comedy.

Sometimes I think life's random events just conspire to entertain me.

imbaczek writes "The SSL 3.0+ and TLS 1.0+ protocols are vulnerable to a set of related attacks which allow a man-in-the-middle (MITM) operating at or below the TCP layer to inject a chosen plaintext prefix into the encrypted data stream, often without detection by either end of the connection. This is possible because an 'authentication gap' exists during the renegotiation process, at which the MitM may splice together disparate TLS connections in a completely standards-compliant way. This represents a serious security defect for many or all protocols which run on top of TLS, including HTTPS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Scott points us to yet another (yes, another) case of copyfraud, where someone sends a DMCA takedown notice to stop criticism, rather than actual infringement. In this case, the party accused of misusing the DMCA in this manner (which is illegal) is whoever is behind the website PerfectPitch.com, who offers a fee-based training program that is supposed to help people learn to have (surprise, surprise) perfect pitch. Mac Donn had put up a blog post on TheSession.org, asking about the general concept of having perfect pitch (not the course specifically) leading to a relatively tame discussion in the comments. However, one comment sorta kinda maybe referred negatively (barely) to the website PerfectPitch.com, suggesting that that there are plenty of free resources to help train your ears. In response, it certainly appears that the owner of PerfectPitch.com, Gary Boucherle, sent a DMCA takedown request to Google, who removed all links for that supposedly-offending page from its search index.

But, of course, that makes no sense. Nothing on the page violates the copyright of Boucherle at all. There isn't any content from his website. There is just a reference to it (and it's basically an aside, rather than a direct discussion). From what's presented, it's difficult to see how this isn't a violation of the DMCA with Boucherle claiming copyright on content that he has no rights (at all) over, in attempt to remove from Google's index a webpage that suggests that there are free alternatives that are better than paying for expensive courses.

We see this kind of abuse of the DMCA all too frequently, as various parties use it as a sledgehammer to censor content they dislike, rather than for anything having to do with copyright infringement. It's a massive problem with the DMCA's notice and takedown process, which puts tremendous pressure on services like Google to simply remove the content first, before there's any actual evidence of infringement.

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You can get 'em from the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories webstore.

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FutureDomain writes "A bill which just passed the House Financial Services Committee would require Internet Service Providers to block access to sites hosting financial scams that pose as members of the government-backed Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). The bill, called the Investor Protection Act and sponsored by Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), is broad enough to block not only websites, but email and any other 'electronic material.' 'Internet providers are also worried that Kanjorski's requirement — and the accompanying civil penalties and injunctions — would apply even if the blocking is not technically feasible.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr member yamamo2 and his dad built this high performance double pendulum (aka chaos machine) and dang - can this thing get down or what? Instant physics party anytime! unless of course you happen to close and catch a stray pendulum to the noggin … physics party foul, indeed :(

Related: HOW TO - Build your own Chaos Machine

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MikeChino writes "How many times have you bit into a piece of fruit only to find that you're also chomping on a sticker label? The small sticky labels have long been the bane of waste-conscious fruit and vegetable eaters, but that might all change thanks to new technology that uses a low-energy carbon dioxide laser beam to etch information directly onto produce. No more peeling those annoying labels! So far the technology is being used on a number of fruits and vegetables in New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Rim countries, and it's currently going through the final stages of review by the FDA. Once the technology is approved in the US, researchers from the University of Florida and the USDA Agricultural Research Service hope that it will be used in Florida's massive grapefruit industry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure. It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge'). And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold.

Everybody Dies [Jim Munroe]

It was the inclusion of Jim Munroe's Everybody Dies (pictured at top) as a 2009 Indiecade finalist that provided that first hook: a tale of life, death, suburban ennui and toilet-cleaning that inter-weaves the various employees of a remote Cost Cutters department store. Like most IF, it's a story and set of characters that you would be hard-pressed to find outside the text-only genre, and a setup that would be impossible to get through as neatly in almost any other way. Visit Munroe's post to play the game via Java (a necessary conceit to get the full impact of Michael Cho's interspersed artwork).

Playing Munroe's game, though, reminded me that there was a huge body of work at my fingertips that I'd long been neglecting, with the early App Store release of Frotz, an iPhone interpreter that lets you browse, download, and play a staggering number of IF games on the go.

It was with the reinstallation of Frotz that I went back to complete the one game that I'd heard repeatedly referred to as the new modern IF classic:

Photopia [Adam Cadre]

Now already more than a decade old, it doesn't take long to realize why the game's still only talked about in hushed, reverant tones: its own inter-woven tale is told so delicately and subtly, its emotional hooks and jabs hit you so softly you aren't even quite sure until minutes later that you've even been punched. Photopia's also unique in the way it utilizes color -- that is, simply the background color over which the text is overlaid -- as signifiers and symbols tied to the story itself. It's dream-like, sobering, and a struggle to recommend without giving away any information that would spoil the story.

Play it via Frotz, or play in your browser through the free App Engine interpreter Parchment by clicking this link.

Violet [Jeremy Freese]

And finally, the last game I've made my way through in recent weeks took top prize in the IFComp's 2008 competition, Jeremy Freese's Violet. Like both games above, it's a premise that seems virtually untranslatable to any other genre of games, but one universally recognizable: your goal is simply to write 1000 words of your grad school dissertation, hounded constantly by another thousand tiny distractions. What sets it apart, though, is how it plays with the narration of text adventures themselves, as it describes your surroundings and actions via the lovingly chiding and pet-name-calling mental-voice of the main character's (current? ex?) girlfriend, an omni-presence but a player never actually in the room.

Again, it's an essential play and perfect ambassador to the new guard of interactive fiction, playable again via Frotz or via Parchment by clicking this link.

Obviously by no means exhaustive, this article should whet your appetite for the hundreds more games available: please leave suggestions for least of all me as we dig down further via the comments below!

As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure. It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge'). And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold.

Everybody Dies [Jim Munroe]

It was the inclusion of Jim Munroe's Everybody Dies (pictured at top) as a 2009 Indiecade finalist that provided that first hook: a tale of life, death, suburban ennui and toilet-cleaning that inter-weaves the various employees of a remote Cost Cutters department store. Like most IF, it's a story and set of characters that you would be hard-pressed to find outside the text-only genre, and a setup that would be impossible to get through as neatly in almost any other way. Visit Munroe's post to play the game via Java (a necessary conceit to get the full impact of Michael Cho's interspersed artwork).

Playing Munroe's game, though, reminded me that there was a huge body of work at my fingertips that I'd long been neglecting, with the early App Store release of Frotz, an iPhone interpreter that lets you browse, download, and play a staggering number of IF games on the go.

It was with the reinstallation of Frotz that I went back to complete the one game that I'd heard repeatedly referred to as the new modern IF classic:

Photopia [Adam Cadre]

Now already more than a decade old, it doesn't take long to realize why the game's still only talked about in hushed, reverant tones: its own inter-woven tale is told so delicately and subtly, its emotional hooks and jabs hit you so softly you aren't even quite sure until minutes later that you've even been punched. Photopia's also unique in the way it utilizes color -- that is, simply the background color over which the text is overlaid -- as signifiers and symbols tied to the story itself. It's dream-like, sobering, and a struggle to recommend without giving away any information that would spoil the story.

Play it via Frotz, or play in your browser through the free App Engine interpreter Parchment by clicking this link.

Violet [Jeremy Freese]

And finally, the last game I've made my way through in recent weeks took top prize in the IFComp's 2008 competition, Jeremy Freese's Violet. Like both games above, it's a premise that seems virtually untranslatable to any other genre of games, but one universally recognizable: your goal is simply to write 1000 words of your grad school dissertation, hounded constantly by another thousand tiny distractions. What sets it apart, though, is how it plays with the narration of text adventures themselves, as it describes your surroundings and actions via the lovingly chiding and pet-name-calling mental-voice of the main character's (current? ex?) girlfriend, an omni-presence but a player never actually in the room.

Again, it's an essential play and perfect ambassador to the new guard of interactive fiction, playable again via Frotz or via Parchment by clicking this link.

Obviously by no means exhaustive, this article should whet your appetite for the hundreds more games available: please leave suggestions for least of all me as we dig down further via the comments below!

A few weeks back, I noted that the low-budget (but highly-profitable) Paranormal Activity movie might teach Paramount a thing or two about how the business of making movies could succeed without spending millions on big stars and overly-expensive sets. However, it doesn't look like that was the lesson learned here. Paramount's CEO Philippe Dauman was recently interviewed about the success of the movie and talked about plans to make a sequel that he said would require the right marketing to ensure a benefit to Paramount. There's also the following insight into Dauman's strategy:

Asked by an analyst if the "Paranormal" model of a low-cost, high-box office film could be easily replicated with other releases, he said no, pointing to how much time passed between similar surprise hit "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal."

So apparently, the decade that passed between Blair Witch and Paranormal makes for some kind of justification that low-budget movies can't be made profitably at will. Um. But couldn't that decade also be interpreted to mean that a studio should want to try more low-budget productions, more frequently? I can certainly understand that Paramount might not want to adopt a "throw everything at the wall to see what sticks" kind of business model for its movies. However, the existence of two huge box office hits that were produced for a pittance sounds more like proof that such a business model could work -- not a "lightning sometimes strikes twice" argument against making low-cost movies. But on the other hand, looking at the returns from the $15 million sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, that release grossed almost $48 million worldwide... and there's talk of another sequel for Blair Witch on the way. The scary ending to this story appears to be an endless cycle of horror movie sequels.

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Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of taking the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport out on the town in Menlo Park, California. It's the latest from the eco-friendly, Silicon Valley-based super-fast all-electric-car company started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. I can't really afford one in my everyday life (this orange beauty retails at $150K), so I decided to test its street cred by taking it out to some classy American locales. There was drive-thru Jack in the Crack a few blocks from the Tesla showroom, so I decided to stop there for a cup of coffee.

It was lunchtime, and there were a half a dozen cars merging into the drive-thru lane from two entrances to get their fix of Ultimate Cheeseburgers and Jumbo Jacks. A Jeep Cherokee let me cut in even though he was clearly there first. (That would have never happened in my RSX.)

The Roadster Sport looks slick, but it is strangely devoid of typical sports car characteristics in the way it sounds and feels. Like its predecessors, the Roadster Sport doesn't have gears &mdash it has single speed transmission. Instead of a gear shift knob, there are buttons labeled P, R, N, and D. This means there's no rumbling or jerkiness when you accelerate; it just shoots up smoothly and silently like one of those crazy free fall rides at the amusement park. But still, this is one fast machine! It does 0-60 in 3.7 seconds--that's faster than a Porsche Carrera GT.

As I rolled up to the giant menu billboard, some guy in a beat up Toyota revved his engine and winked at me repeatedly. I smiled politely and ordered a coffee with extra sugar and a few packets of ketchup.

The Roadster Sport has one cup holder which folds out from the center console to the passenger side. I like that it provides utility without impeding on the clean design, but that also meant that the coffee resided under my passenger's legs, which made it hard to reach for.

In a way, this car is more like a drivable computer than an ordinary car. It runs on Li-Ion batteries, charges its internal battery at any electrical socket, and needs the occasional firmware upgrade. You never have to go to a gas station or get an oil change. Looking at the company's DNA, it's not hard to figure out why — only a third of the Tesla Motors' 500 employees were hired out of the auto industry. The rest are mostly Silicon Valley types, including industrial designers from Apple and engineers from Google and YouTube.

The company claims that the car averages about 244 miles per charge, driven at a normal speed. Each full charge costs about $4.90 worth of electricity at an ordinary 120V outlet in California. That means that it is very economical and ecological if you're rich enough to afford one. It's not ideal for road trips longer than 244 miles, though — what are you supposed to do if you run out of juice in the middle of a highway?

The great thing about Menlo Park is that, despite its vicinity to some of the greatest tech companies in the world, it is not devoid of good old suburban charm. To my delight, there was a Target just minutes away from the Tesla showroom — the ultimate place-to-go-to-buy-things-I-never-knew-I-needed. Some of the luxurious accessories on my Tesla were things I never knew I needed, too — a USB port, an iPod dock, two screens, inflatable lumbar support, and a carbon fiber exterior from France.

After short stops at Taco Bell (I like gorditas) and Oil Changers (I was just curious what they'd say — a nice Hispanic man politely told me that they do not service Teslas), I returned the Roadster Sport to the Tesla store...

...but not before giving it a friendly Hello Kitty makeover.

Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of taking the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport out on the town in Menlo Park, California. It's the latest from the eco-friendly, Silicon Valley-based super-fast all-electric-car company started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. I can't really afford one in my everyday life (this orange beauty retails at $150K), so I decided to test its street cred by taking it out to some classy American locales. There was drive-thru Jack in the Crack a few blocks from the Tesla showroom, so I decided to stop there for a cup of coffee.

It was lunchtime, and there were a half a dozen cars merging into the drive-thru lane from two entrances to get their fix of Ultimate Cheeseburgers and Jumbo Jacks. A Jeep Cherokee let me cut in even though he was clearly there first. (That would have never happened in my RSX.)

The Roadster Sport looks slick, but it is strangely devoid of typical sports car characteristics in the way it sounds and feels. Like its predecessors, the Roadster Sport doesn't have gears &mdash it has single speed transmission. Instead of a gear shift knob, there are buttons labeled P, R, N, and D. This means there's no rumbling or jerkiness when you accelerate; it just shoots up smoothly and silently like one of those crazy free fall rides at the amusement park. But still, this is one fast machine! It does 0-60 in 3.7 seconds--that's faster than a Porsche Carrera GT.

As I rolled up to the giant menu billboard, some guy in a beat up Toyota revved his engine and winked at me repeatedly. I smiled politely and ordered a coffee with extra sugar and a few packets of ketchup.

The Roadster Sport has one cup holder which folds out from the center console to the passenger side. I like that it provides utility without impeding on the clean design, but that also meant that the coffee resided under my passenger's legs, which made it hard to reach for.

In a way, this car is more like a drivable computer than an ordinary car. It runs on Li-Ion batteries, charges its internal battery at any electrical socket, and needs the occasional firmware upgrade. You never have to go to a gas station or get an oil change. Looking at the company's DNA, it's not hard to figure out why — only a third of the Tesla Motors' 500 employees were hired out of the auto industry. The rest are mostly Silicon Valley types, including industrial designers from Apple and engineers from Google and YouTube.

The company claims that the car averages about 244 miles per charge, driven at a normal speed. Each full charge costs about $4.90 worth of electricity at an ordinary 120V outlet in California. That means that it is very economical and ecological if you're rich enough to afford one. It's not ideal for road trips longer than 244 miles, though — what are you supposed to do if you run out of juice in the middle of a highway?

The great thing about Menlo Park is that, despite its vicinity to some of the greatest tech companies in the world, it is not devoid of good old suburban charm. To my delight, there was a Target just minutes away from the Tesla showroom — the ultimate place-to-go-to-buy-things-I-never-knew-I-needed. Some of the luxurious accessories on my Tesla were things I never knew I needed, too — a USB port, an iPod dock, two screens, inflatable lumbar support, and a carbon fiber exterior from France.

After short stops at Taco Bell (I like gorditas) and Oil Changers (I was just curious what they'd say — a nice Hispanic man politely told me that they do not service Teslas), I returned the Roadster Sport to the Tesla store...

...but not before giving it a friendly Hello Kitty makeover.

The user interface to the R1 radio is both familiar and unique. Roll up and down for volume or scroll left to right to tune. It's brilliant in its simplicity and rather stylish in a contoured minimalist design. [via GeekyGadgets]

An analog radio is one of most important product for a blind people. In the using a behavior of how people manipulated rather than burying all of interaction in to the product. So adjusting radio to the right station would require a new kind of manipulation rather than simply tuning a knob. 'R1' has designed for them to control the radio more intuitively. By using a wheel structure user can control the radio by physical movement. The 'R1' allowed users to turn gadget on or off and to control volume and tuning simply by physically rolling the radio forward, backward and sideways.

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The user interface to the R1 radio is both familiar and unique. Roll up and down for volume or scroll left to right to tune. It's brilliant in its simplicity and rather stylish in a contoured minimalist design. [via GeekyGadgets]

An analog radio is one of most important product for a blind people. In the using a behavior of how people manipulated rather than burying all of interaction in to the product. So adjusting radio to the right station would require a new kind of manipulation rather than simply tuning a knob. 'R1' has designed for them to control the radio more intuitively. By using a wheel structure user can control the radio by physical movement. The 'R1' allowed users to turn gadget on or off and to control volume and tuning simply by physically rolling the radio forward, backward and sideways.

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Just Posted: Our preview samples gallery from the Leica X1. We've had a fully functional sample of Leica's high-end large-sensor compact for a few days now, just long enough to grab a few sample shots to give you an initial impression of the image quality attainable at a range of ISO settings and apertures.

From a slew of new brainwave toys and bionic monkeys to advanced brain scans and wireless neuro-implants that will soon enable paralyzed people to remotely operate computers with their minds, the gap in the human-machine interface is closing. But while mind-reading gets all the glory, other researchers are developing new amazing non-drug methods to control the brain as well. We've posted many times about zapping regions of the brain with magnetic pulses, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, to treat depression, boost creativity, or even improve reaction time. And brain "pacemakers" are increasingly common treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson's, and even depression. What's next? Mind control through sound and light.

Arizona State University researchers are using ultrasound pulses to stimulate activity deep inside the brain from the outside. The sound waves cause brain cells to spew certain chemical neurotransmitters, ultimately resulting in physical movements or other effects. The technique may also be used to lower the brain's metabolic rate after an injury to reduce secondary damage.

"We're trying to develop the technology to the point where we can do away with the electrodes that are used in vagus nerve stimulation and deep brain stimulation," ASU professor William J. Tyler told IEEE Spectrum:

The low frequencies used can travel some distance through the air. So could you be zapped with a mood-altering blast from across a room? Probably not, Tyler says. In theory, the ultrasound technique could work from up to about a meter away, he says. "The farthest we've tried so far has been roughly 50 millimeters."

Meanwhile, other researchers are exploring how light, rather than sound, can be used to reprogram the brain. The field is called optogenetics and lies at the intersection of optics and biotechnology, specifically genetic engineering. By introducing genes that encode for channels and enzymes that are light-sensitive, scientists can "probe" the brain with light to learn about neuronal function. A fiber optic cable is literally plugged into the skull to excite the appropriate brain bits, essentially introducing an on/off switch in the head. (See the image at top from Stanford University's Optogenetics Resource Center, led by optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroth.)

"We are inventing new tools for analyzing and engineering brain circuits," says Ed Boyden, director of MIT's Synthetic Neurobiology Group and a leader in the field. We are devising technologies for controlling specific neural circuit elements, to understand their causal contribution to normal and pathological neural computations."

In the new issue of Wired, Institute for the Future affiliate Michael Chorost, author of the fantastic book Rebuilt, visits with Deisseroth and Boyden, and explains how optogenetics was used to make mice with paralyzing Parkinson's walk again. Fortunately, it doesn't sound like folks undergoing optogenetic treatments in the future will have fiber optic cables snaking out of their skulls. From Wired:

One of Deisseroth's colleagues designed a paddle about one-third the length of a popsicle stick. It has four LEDs: two blue ones to make neurons fire and two yellow ones to stop them. Attached to the paddle is a little box that provides power and instructions. The paddle is implanted on the surface of the brain, on top of the motor control area. The lights are bright enough to illuminate a fairly large volume of tissue, so the placement doesn't have to be exact. The light-sensitizing genes are injected into the affected tissue beforehand. It's a far easier surgery than deep brain electrical stimulation, and, if it works, a far more precise treatment. Researchers at Stanford are currently testing the device on primates. If all goes well, they will seek FDA approval for experiments in humans.

Canon has posted a firmware update for its EOS 7D digital SLR that corrects the previously reported problem where traces of a preceding frame may be visible in images captured in continuous shooting mode. The firmware is available for immediate download from Canon's website.

Stephanie Migot writes in to let us know how UK law firm Wragge & Co has decided to set up a special "cyber tracing" team, whose job it will be to scour the internet for anyone making negative anonymous comments about any of their clients and then take action. Of course, the law firm says it's really looking for people leaking confidential information (such as disgruntled employees), but, as you probably know, defamation laws in the UK are significantly more draconian than those elsewhere. Thus, the line is a lot more blurry, and will almost certainly lead to these sorts of activities targeting mere criticism and complaints, rather than true defamation. The unfortunate end result is a series of chilling effects on any concept of free speech.

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An anonymous reader writes 'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle is perfect for any of our online readers that haven't subscribed to the print edition of MAKE Magazine. For a limited time we are offering the Welcome to MAKE bundle at an amazing discount of $48. That's 46% off the price if you purchased these items individually.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle includes:

• A Year subscription to MAKE Magazine $34.95 value
• The Best of MAKE $34.99 value
• A Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

David King built this stoplight costume for his oldest daughter. It's his first Arduino project. Besides flashing the expected red, green, and yellow lights, it incorporates an Adafruit WaveShield to play music. [Thanks, David!]

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino WaveShield Kit

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their name released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their name released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an on-set shot of Carrie Fisher in her iconic "bikini Leia" mode, along with her stunt double, catching some rays during the filming of Return of the Jedi.

Bikini Leia and her stunt double nap in the Tatooine sunshine (via JWZ)

Boyhowdy sez, "The folk covers of Straight to Hell I compiled last year were so well-received by your readers, I thought you might also be interested in this week's entry, which compiles folk and acoustic covers of more songs from Punk's first and second waves. From banjo-tinged Stooges covers to countrified Blondie, singer-songwriter Bad Brains covers to smooth and ghostly Clash transformations, there's likely something here for everyone. Especially fun for uke-fans: a cover of Ramones classic I Wanna Be Sedated from Allo, Darlin'."

Don't miss the bluegrass "Lust for Life" and the king-hell sweet Japanese acoustic "Lost in the Supermarket."

All Folked Up: The Punk Rock Collection, Vol. 1 (folk covers of seminal first and second wave punk music)

Alex sez,

The battle over your home entertainment equipment is heating up again and the time to make your voice heard is now. Hollywood wants the FCC to grant the studios permission to engage in so-called ""Selectable Output Control." SOC is a tech mandate that would allow movie studios to shut off video outputs on the back of your cable box and DVR during the screening of certain movies over cable.

SOC is bad because it could inhibit future innovation, obstruct interoperability, limit fair use and restrict consumer choice. Worst of all, it could force you to buy all new home entertainment gear in order to watch Hollywood films over cable.

Thirteen public interest groups today said the FCC should not respond to the "whims of industry" and grant the motion picture lobby the ability to control how consumers use their television sets and set-top boxes. As many as 20 million TV sets could be affected.

Take Action Now!

Yes, you read that right. The studios want the right to randomly switch off parts of your home theater depending on which program you're watching. And the FCC is taking this batshit proposal seriously.

So do something.

Tell the FCC to Say "No" to the Cable Kill Switch (Thanks, Alex!)

For many years, David Chaum has been pushing for a voting system that he claims will be a lot more reliable. Basically, after you vote, you get a coded number, and then after the election, you can go to an election website, punch in your code and make sure that your vote counted, and was for whom you meant to vote. On top of this, there's a system for auditors to check to make sure that votes were counted accurately, with information released publicly so people can "audit" the election without being able to connect voters to their votes. This system tends to generate a lot of controversy (though some of it appears to be from people who just don't like David Chaum, rather than because they really have a problem with his system). However, the system hasn't been really tested in an actual US election... until now. The municipal elections in Takoma Park, Maryland used the system, despite the state recently signing a big deal with Diebold. It's not clear how the overall election went yet -- or how many people actually checked their votes online (approximately 30% in an exit poll said they copied down the code). However, it's good to see that some gov'ts are not just accepting what the big e-voting firms give them, and are willing to explore more sophisticated voting systems that aren't based on pure faith in the e-voting company to get the system right.

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ennael writes ""We finally did it. Mandriva Linux 2010 is out and comes with many improvements and innovations. We still go on supporting in the same level of integration GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.2. Support for netbooks is improved as users can now easily test Moblin 2.0 environment. "Smart desktop" coming from European research is now fully integrated and is the first real working semantic desktop. Mandriva Control Center also bring improvements in tools: new netprofile management tool, gui for Tomoyo security framework, and parental control. A big thank to our community who worked hard and made this release possible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olympus has announced the E-P2 just five months after the launch of its first Micro Four-Thirds camera, the E-P1. It's a minor upgrade with the addition of a port for a new high resolution electronic viewfinder (or external microphone), two new Art filters and a pearlescent black finish. It also gains AF tracking and includes a new i-Enhance 'colour boosting' function. Available from January 2010, the E-ro Four Thirds zoomsP2 with VF-2 electronic viewfinder and either 17mm pancake or 14-42mm zoom lens will sell for a suggested retail price of $1099.99. The company has also said it will launch the M.Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 wideangle and M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm F4.0-5.6 superzoom Micro Four Thirds lenses in the first half of 2010.

upto0013 writes "Chinese bureaucrats are battling each other for the right to regulate World of Warcraft. They hope to gain the political clout and the revenue that comes along with controlling a new industry with potential for explosive growth. 'If you supervise a more dynamic area with a lot of growth potential, you have more budget and more administrative muscle,' said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing. 'They see this pie is getting bigger and bigger, so it is no wonder different administrations are fighting over pieces of that territory.' It's absurd how orcs and elves (and Moonkin) can affect so many different faraway places."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

upto0013 writes "Chinese bureaucrats are battling each other for the right to regulate World of Warcraft. They hope to gain the political clout and the revenue that comes along with controlling a new industry with potential for explosive growth. 'If you supervise a more dynamic area with a lot of growth potential, you have more budget and more administrative muscle,' said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing. 'They see this pie is getting bigger and bigger, so it is no wonder different administrations are fighting over pieces of that territory.' It's absurd how orcs and elves (and Moonkin) can affect so many different faraway places."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When the election results first came in for the EU Parliament back in June, it initially looked like the Swedish Pirate Party would get two seats, though it was later downgraded to just one. However, it looks like they're back up to two due to a recent treaty agreement. This means that Amelia Andersdotter will be joining Christian Engstrom in the EU Parliament, representing the Pirate Party and the rights of consumers. I've seen Amelia speak in the past, and, like Christian, I think she does an excellent job explaining the position of the Pirate Party and the civil rights issues it represents.

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