xp65 writes "NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. 'We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,' said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 'We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

xp65 writes "NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. 'We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,' said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 'We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yo, where my ships at? You'll never have to ask again. marinetraffic.com is a fun way to burn otherwise productive time. Cargo ships, military vessels, luxury high-speed yachts: track them, and imagine yourself out there on the high seas, instead of in that cubicle. (thanks, @shirky)

Tim Lee points us to an excellent discussion at The Abstract Factory blog for why software patents harm innovation (though, I'd argue that the reasoning set forth applies beyond just software patents). The writer, Cog, initially discusses the sort of story that's all too common these days, about some friends of his who build a cool online service, with plenty of important details in the execution and the implementation that make it better and significantly more useful than whatever else is out there... only to find themselves sued by a patent holder, whose own technology includes none of the wonderfulness that makes Cog's friends' product so powerful. From there, he goes on:

One thing that I find extremely frustrating about many legal scholars and economists' approach to patents it that they make two false assumptions. The first assumption is that transaction costs are acceptable, or can be made so with some modest reforms. The second assumption is that patent litigation is reasonably "precise"; i.e., if you don't infringe on something then you'll be able to build useful technology and bring it to market relatively unhindered. As my friend's story shows, both of these assumptions are laughably false. I mean, just black-is-white, up-is-down, slavery-is-freedom, we-have-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia false.

The end result is that our patent system encourages "land grab" behavior which could practically serve as the dictionary definition of rent-seeking. The closest analogy is a conquistador planting a flag on a random outcropping of rock at the tip of some peninsula, and then saying "I claim all this land for Spain", and then the entire Western hemisphere allegedly becomes the property of the Spanish crown. This is a theory of property that's light-years away from any Lockean notion of mixing your labor with the land or any Smithian notion of promoting economic efficiency. And yet it's the state of the law for software patents. Your business plan can literally be to build a half-assed implementation of some straightforward idea (or, in the case of Intellectual Ventures, don't build it at all), file a patent, and subsequently sue the pants off anybody who comes anywhere near the turf you've claimed. And if they do come near your turf, regardless of how much of their own sweat and blood they put into their independent invention, the legal system's going go off under them like a land mine.

It is hard to think of a more effective mechanism for discouraging innovation in software. I mean, I suppose you could plant a plastic explosive rigged to a random number generator under the seats of every software developer, and that would be slightly worse.

The only thing I'd quibble with is the claim that this is the typical economists' approach to patents. Plenty of very smart economists (including some Nobel Prize winners) agree that the patent system makes no sense. But, other than that, this is quite an accurate description of the problem and the underlying fallacies from those who think the system works. Cog also points out (as we have in the past) that it's ridiculous to claim that the patent system serves a separate purpose in "disclosing" inventions such that everyone can learn from them:

At any software company with competent legal counsel, developers are instructed in the strongest possible terms never, ever to look at a patent, because the tiniest amount of documented influence could be used as ammunition in a lawsuit. The only time a sane software developer reads a patent is when your company's lawyers specifically ask you to help them prove you're not infringing on one. If you ever get wind that there's a patent even vaguely related to your work, you stick your fingers in your ears and run in the other direction. In short, software patents facilitate "conversation" about as well as poison gas bombs do.

What he's talking about is the fact that if you're found to have willfully infringed on a patent, the damages suddenly get tripled. And, showing that you looked at the patent in question is often how patent holders will claim willful infringement. The system is designed such that whatever benefits there may be from "disclosure" have been completely wiped out due to willful infringement damages.

Oh yeah. As for Cog's friends? They're basically screwed:

Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers and they've said, "Yep, the law is probably on your side." They have also said, "You're still screwed." The trial would take forever, the legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it.

So, none of us ever get to see or use the software that they created. That's the opposite of what the patent system is supposed to do.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Tim Lee points us to an excellent discussion at The Abstract Factory blog for why software patents harm innovation (though, I'd argue that the reasoning set forth applies beyond just software patents). The writer, Cog, initially discusses the sort of story that's all too common these days, about some friends of his who build a cool online service, with plenty of important details in the execution and the implementation that make it better and significantly more useful than whatever else is out there... only to find themselves sued by a patent holder, whose own technology includes none of the wonderfulness that makes Cog's friends' product so powerful. From there, he goes on:

One thing that I find extremely frustrating about many legal scholars and economists' approach to patents it that they make two false assumptions. The first assumption is that transaction costs are acceptable, or can be made so with some modest reforms. The second assumption is that patent litigation is reasonably "precise"; i.e., if you don't infringe on something then you'll be able to build useful technology and bring it to market relatively unhindered. As my friend's story shows, both of these assumptions are laughably false. I mean, just black-is-white, up-is-down, slavery-is-freedom, we-have-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia false.

The end result is that our patent system encourages "land grab" behavior which could practically serve as the dictionary definition of rent-seeking. The closest analogy is a conquistador planting a flag on a random outcropping of rock at the tip of some peninsula, and then saying "I claim all this land for Spain", and then the entire Western hemisphere allegedly becomes the property of the Spanish crown. This is a theory of property that's light-years away from any Lockean notion of mixing your labor with the land or any Smithian notion of promoting economic efficiency. And yet it's the state of the law for software patents. Your business plan can literally be to build a half-assed implementation of some straightforward idea (or, in the case of Intellectual Ventures, don't build it at all), file a patent, and subsequently sue the pants off anybody who comes anywhere near the turf you've claimed. And if they do come near your turf, regardless of how much of their own sweat and blood they put into their independent invention, the legal system's going go off under them like a land mine.

It is hard to think of a more effective mechanism for discouraging innovation in software. I mean, I suppose you could plant a plastic explosive rigged to a random number generator under the seats of every software developer, and that would be slightly worse.

The only thing I'd quibble with is the claim that this is the typical economists' approach to patents. Plenty of very smart economists (including some Nobel Prize winners) agree that the patent system makes no sense. But, other than that, this is quite an accurate description of the problem and the underlying fallacies from those who think the system works. Cog also points out (as we have in the past) that it's ridiculous to claim that the patent system serves a separate purpose in "disclosing" inventions such that everyone can learn from them:

At any software company with competent legal counsel, developers are instructed in the strongest possible terms never, ever to look at a patent, because the tiniest amount of documented influence could be used as ammunition in a lawsuit. The only time a sane software developer reads a patent is when your company's lawyers specifically ask you to help them prove you're not infringing on one. If you ever get wind that there's a patent even vaguely related to your work, you stick your fingers in your ears and run in the other direction. In short, software patents facilitate "conversation" about as well as poison gas bombs do.

What he's talking about is the fact that if you're found to have willfully infringed on a patent, the damages suddenly get tripled. And, showing that you looked at the patent in question is often how patent holders will claim willful infringement. The system is designed such that whatever benefits there may be from "disclosure" have been completely wiped out due to willful infringement damages.

Oh yeah. As for Cog's friends? They're basically screwed:

Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers and they've said, "Yep, the law is probably on your side." They have also said, "You're still screwed." The trial would take forever, the legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it.

So, none of us ever get to see or use the software that they created. That's the opposite of what the patent system is supposed to do.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A US-based genomics company announces that it can perform genomic sequencing for under five thousand dollars. In my budget, that's "fully loaded 8-Core Mac Pro and a monitor," or "sweet new Canon 5D with one nice lens." But unlike those tools I covet, DNA is forever.

How many of the kooky military research projects featured in The Men Who Stare at Goats really happened? Reality is more complicated than the movie (or the book), reports David Hambling at Wired's Danger Room blog. But reality may also be weirder. Hambling's post examines, Snopes-style, the truth or bogosity of such purported American military projects as:

• Psychic Spies
• Drug experimentation
• Killing animals with telepathy
• Sound weapons
• An army of hippies who can smite you with the sheer force of their BO.

Oh alright, I embellished the last one a bit. Read: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats (Danger Room, thanks Noah Shachtman)

Image: the First Earth Battalion manual (PDF) from the movie, which was based very closely on the original manual created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon. He "dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare -- one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle."

Even though the title of this hilarious short mockumentary video is "Cockhead," it's probably safe for work, since the naughty bit is mosaiced. It was co-written by CJ Davies and Mr Tom Barbor-Might.

Cockhead

In another move sure to continue the certain doom looming over classic publications, Rupert Murdoch has elaborated on the direction he would take in an effort to monetize the content that his websites deliver by attempting to block much of Google's ability to scan and index his news sites. "Murdoch believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. 'There's a doctrine called "fair use," which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,' Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. 'But we'll take that slowly.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created this zoomable window that compares the size of a coffee bean with smaller things like a grain of salt, a paramecium, a red blood cell, a human egg, a glucose molecule, and so on, all the way down to a carbon atom.

Cell size and scale (Via Good Experience newsletter)

Earlier today, Xeni spotted an item by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, encouraging black people to embrace the LGBT status of some of its heroes. Tatchell's been in the news of late for another reason, too: another tussle with fellow progressive activists.

The subject is Tatchell's vocal opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, assailed in "Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the War on Terror," published by Raw Nerve Books. As a result, authors Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem have come under fire. Raw Nerve was even induced to confess a list of "untruths" aimed at Tatchell.

Here's an illustrative paragraph from the apology:

Mr Tatchell has never "claimed the role of liberator and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians." He is not Islamophobic and is not "part of the Islamophobia industry." ... Mr Tatchell has never described "Muslims as Nazis" and he has never made the equation "Muslim=Nazi" or "Muslim=Evil." He has never "collaborated with the extreme right" and never "participated with several racist and fascist groups."

On one hand, Tatchell's "celebrity activist" style irritates those who feel sidelined by his prominence and threatened by his "litigious" reputation. Despite a lifetime building anti-racist credentials, he's often criticized for conflating Islam in general and homophobic muslims.

On the other hand, the paper's attacks could hardly have gone unchallenged. The argument seems compelling, but is layered throughout with a catty academic animus that speaks for itself. Defenders claim that the paper's constructions ("he often describes Muslims as Nazis", "he willingly collaborates with the extreme right", "reducing Islamophobia...to a fad which they can cash in on") were taken out of context. That Tatchell hasn't sued them shows not a little restraint, the obviously-forced apology notwithstanding.

The best line in the paper: "Criticism of him is dangerous." Woops!

Photo: Petertatchell.net

Last week, Conan O'Brien had William Shatner stop by and read what was believed (at the time) to be twitter messages by Levi Johnston, the former boyfriend to Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol (and father of Bristol's child). O'Brien has done this before, having Shatner read out Sarah Palin's twitter messages, as spoken word poetry. It's an amusing gimmick. The only problem this time around was that the tweets weren't actually by Johnston, but an impostor. O'Brien quickly apologized. Fair enough.

However, what caught my attention was that Johnston's lawyers didn't just threaten O'Brien, but they threatened Twitter itself:

"My client, Levi Johnston, is being impersonated on your media (Twitter) and this is leading to libel and slanderous statements being attributed to him. ... We want you to put an immediate end to this illegal activity. ... You are being used as a medium to promote this illegality and we want immediate action. ... You are now on notice and must take steps to put an end to what is clearly against the law and against your policy. ... We want to know what steps you will be taking to correct what is clearly a problem which is escalating."

Now, you can understand why they were upset, and Twitter is usually pretty good at responding to such requests and disabling the accounts (sometimes even going too far). However, the claim that Twitter is now "on notice and must take steps" to end the account is simply not true. Twitter, as the service provider, is protected against such claims and has no specific obligation under the law to change things, no matter how much "notice" his lawyers give. You would think that Johnston's lawyers would understand that -- and that they would be aware of earlier attempts, like the one by Tony La Russa to blame Twitter for an impostor, in which La Russa was forced to learn why Twitter is not liable.

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Lesson 1: When choosing gifts for your date, remember that girls prefer flowers to piles of fungus-ridden dung.

You know how some movies or TV shows are painful to watch because you see that a character is making some awkward mistake and you just know it will end horribly? This BBC video is similar. I kept thinking, "No, Mr. Vogelkop Bowerbird! Don't give her that! You'll never get mated!" But, honestly, I was thinking that at the flower-power fellow. Foolishly, I'd assumed that the lesson here was going to be something along the lines of, "Birds like things humans find repugnant and isn't that interesting."

Instead, the lesson turns out to be, "Everybody poops, but that doesn't mean they want to receive it as a gift."

VIDEO: Inside the Love-Den of the Vogelkop Bowerbird, BBC Life

Image courtesy the BBC, via Adam Abu-Nab

eldavojohn writes "A new award-winning thesis from an MIT computer science assistant professor showed that the Nash equilibrium of complex games (like the economy or poker) belong to problems with non-deterministic polynomial (NP) complexity (more specifically PPAD complexity, a subset of TFNP problems which is a subset of FNP problems which is a subset of NP problems). More importantly there should be a single solution for one problem that can be adapted to fit all the other problems. Meaning if you can generalize the solution to poker, you have the ability to discover the Nash equilibrium of the economy. Some computer scientists are calling this the biggest development in game theory in a decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake has posted pics and info on Steampunk Workshop of another maker's build of his Wimshurst machine, a project featured in MAKE, Volume 17. Jake writes:

...This is a very elegant machine and some of Bruce's innovations make it superior to my own!

Here's what the builder, Bruce, says about his version:

These are some differences in my machine from the construction article. The drive bands are 1/8" black braided cord with white strands inside from an army surplus store with the ends melted together. The current Leyden jars are plastic toothpick containers on top of pieces of florescent light tube protector material salvaged from one of several protector tubing jars that shorted between the foil edges. The collector supports are pieces of small size PVC tubing with brass couplings hammered into the ends and glued with thin CA glue. The set screw collars are made from nylon spacers and 6-32 brass screws.

Bruce's Wimshurst Machine

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue! Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, Subscribe to MAKE, or Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber).

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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

Jake has posted pics and info on Steampunk Workshop of another maker's build of his Wimshurst machine, a project featured in MAKE, Volume 17. Jake writes:

...This is a very elegant machine and some of Bruce's innovations make it superior to my own!

Here's what the builder, Bruce, says about his version:

These are some differences in my machine from the construction article. The drive bands are 1/8" black braided cord with white strands inside from an army surplus store with the ends melted together. The current Leyden jars are plastic toothpick containers on top of pieces of florescent light tube protector material salvaged from one of several protector tubing jars that shorted between the foil edges. The collector supports are pieces of small size PVC tubing with brass couplings hammered into the ends and glued with thin CA glue. The set screw collars are made from nylon spacers and 6-32 brass screws.

Bruce's Wimshurst Machine

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue! Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, Subscribe to MAKE, or Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber).

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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

From Instructables user ModMischief comes a great tutorial on building this impossibly clever one-person trompe l'oeil costume. As she says, "[w]hy choose between dressing as a sexy mermaid or a scary pirate when you could be both!"

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

From Instructables user ModMischief comes a great tutorial on building this impossibly clever one-person trompe l'oeil costume. As she says, "[w]hy choose between dressing as a sexy mermaid or a scary pirate when you could be both!"

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

mpapet writes to ask about the ins and outs of datacenter evaluation. Beyond the simpler questions of physical access control, connectivity, and power redundancy/capacity and SLA review, what other questions are important to ask when evaluating a data center? What data centers have people been happy with? What horror stories have people lived through with those that didn't make the cut?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember the BBC's daft plan to put DRM on high-definition broadcasts even though it's illegal for the BBC to put DRM on its broadcasts? Remember when people rose up and sent angry letters to Ofcom, the UK regulator that oversees the BBC's broadcasting activity?

It worked. Ofcom told the BBC to forget about it. Score one for the good guys. Give yourselves several pats on the back.

Meanwhile: the Beeb should be ashamed of itself. Especially for this disingenuous smear-job they published after I wrote about this ridiculous plan in the Guardian.

Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer 'fair use' and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation. In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration. We remain keen to support the successful introduction of HD services on the DTT platform and are willing to consider a further round of consultation on the licence amendment if you could provide more information and evidence in the following three areas:

1. The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;

2. How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;

3. An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.

We are keen to provide early clarity on the licence amendment to all stakeholders affected by the DVB-T2, MPEG 4, HDTV upgrade on the DTT platform and would welcome your early response on these three issues. Until we reach a final decision on the licence amendment the HD service information broadcast on Multiplex B should be provided in a free to air format. If Huffman compression is used then the related tables should be made available to receiver manufacturers without the need for a licence for Huffman look-up tables from the BBC.

HD on DTT content management proposals (PDF) (Thanks, Glyn!)

We just wrote about how the Danish anti-piracy group was dropping its lawsuits against individual file sharers after realizing that Danish law made it almost impossible for the industry to win those cases. However, as pointed out by brokep, the international wing of the recording industry, the IFPI, wasted little time in trying to spin the news in its favor (Google translation of the original). The IFPI insists that the lawsuits won't stop, but just that the anti-piracy organization was realizing it needed more detailed evidence -- and this means that it will now start seizing computers to get evidence. Now, the Google translation trips up over the word "beslagslaeggelse," but multiple Danish speakers have confirmed that the word means "seize" or "confiscate." Of course, that raises some questions about why a private organization representing record labels has any right to seize computers of individuals. I think they were better off when they just admitted they were going to give up on the counterproductive legal strategy.

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"Malcolm X was bisexual. Get over it." A most provocative headline from the Guardian during Black History Month in the UK. About the writer, one BB commenter responds, "The thought of actually having a black LGBT person talk about black LGBT issues never crossed the Guardian's mind?"

Humberto writes in to point us at this handy use of the Google Voice transcription feature. In his Voice2LED Project, Josh converted a simple LED sign into a voice-activated one by connecting it up to his phone number. It turns out that when you leave a message on a Google Voice voice-mail account, it is automatically transcribed into text and sent to your email. To take advantage of this, Josh built a program that looks for messages that start with a particular phrase, and then displays the rest of the text on the screen. He built the sign using instructions from nerdkits, and his source code is listed on his site.

This looks like a fun way to leave messages or notifications to the people that you live with.

In the Maker Shed:

Peggy 2 Kit

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

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a recent FAQ released by Oracle outlines the plans for many of Sun's popular products like GlassFish, MySQL, and NetBeans. Many are worried at some of the possible avenues the decisions outlined could lead to, especially with respect to NetBeans. "What should have happened, Oracle should not have missed a beat and should have announced work on Oracle plugins for NetBeans and active Oracle support of NetBeans. This type of announcement would have brought a large and some-what skeptical NetBeans community much closer to Oracle. It would have been a big win for Oracle. NetBeans will continue to grow either way - but Oracle has missed a big chance to really change perceptions and at the same time move their tools to another level. What JDeveloper lacks is buzz, a wealth of community developed plugins, a wealth of support for other languages and a very, very large community. And of course it does not offer a platform in the NetBeans and Eclipse sense of the word. This is a huge missed opportunity for Oracle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we wrote about the highly troubling efforts by the head of software firm Jenzabar to abuse trademark law to stifle criticism of that company's founder and CEO (who, earlier in her life, was famous for "leading" part of the student uprising in Tiananmen Square. She was upset at the makers of a documentary film that was somewhat critical of her, and she tried to use trademark law against them, after an attempt at defamation failed. There is simply no trademark violation at all in this situation... but it is a company with lots of cash suing some independent documentary film makers, so it has all the appearances of filing a lawsuit just to cause trouble for the filmmakers.

Our posts were based on some blog posts by Public Citizen, criticizing Jenzabar and its founder/CEO Ling Chai. Rather than recognizing that it's going too far, Jenzabar apparently decided to go on the attack. Public Citizen's Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the news that Chai and Jenzabar are now claiming that Public Citizen's blogging about the case is illegal.

Specifically, the complaint from Jenzabar is that Levy pointing out that Google has stated that it does not use metatags in its search algorithms is not admissible and will "cause prejudice," because it is not an official statement from Google. That, of course, is silly. Google has made it clear for a while that it doesn't use metatags, but this particular announcement came from Google's Matt Cutts (disclaimer: an acquaintance/friend of mine) and was on Google's official blog, and Matt regularly speaks for Google on these sorts of issues. Yet, Jenzabar claims that it's "hearsay." That seems like a pretty difficult position to take. Jenzabar really wants to keep insisting that Google uses metatags, even as Google is making clear it does not? And it wants to force the court to censor blog posts to keep living in that fantasy world? Good luck with that...

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On his Big Questions blog, Steven Landsburg (author of a new book called The Big Questions) discusses a partially blind gamer's lawsuit against Sony. The gamer wants Sony to makes its games more accessible for partially blind people.

Here's the first part of Landsburg's thoughts on the issue:

This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?

A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won’t rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?

In The Big Questions, I make two separate (but closely related) arguments on Mary’s behalf. I was about to write a blog post offering the same arguments on behalf of Sony when I realized that only one of them applies. So I am forced to conclude that I should be a little less sympathetic to Sony than I am to Mary. My first argument is that Mary never had any moral obligation to rent to anyone in the first place—and if she has no general obligation to rent to anyone, then she can have no specific obligation to rent to Albanians. Likewise, Sony has no moral obligation to provide anyone with video games—and if there is no moral obligation to provide me with a video game then there is no obligation to provide one to Alexander Stern. Fine so far.

But my second argument is that Mary, appearances to the contrary, is actually doing some good for Albanian apartment seekers. By renting rooms to non-Albanians, she takes a little pressure off the housing market, driving down rents and making it easier for Albanians to find apartments elsewhere. Sure, she could be doing even more for them, but she’s already doing more for them than I am, since I don’t rent apartments to anyone at all. How can she be at fault for doing small amounts of good when I’m given a free pass to do no good at all?

Read the rest at his blog.

futurity.org writes with news that Iowa State researchers have made a breakthrough that could eventually lead to a cure for Parkinson's. Identifying the protein that kills the dopamine-producing cells in the brain has allowed the researchers to disable it and could be the first step in the development of new treatments. "Now, Kanthasamy’s group is looking for additional compounds that also can serve to neutralize protein kinase-C. By identifying more compounds that perform the function of neutralizing kinase-C, researchers are more likely to locate one that works well and has few side effects. This discovery is expected to provide new treatment options to stop the progression of the disease or even cure it. 'Once we find the compound, we need to make sure it’s safe. If everything goes well, it could take about 10 years, and then we might be able to see something that will truly make a difference in the lives of people with this disorder,' says Kanthasamy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again. Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

A Russian actor's group called "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / ??????? ???????) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film. (Via Neatorama)

The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

You spend a lot of time online. Maybe it comes with the job. Maybe your idea of a perfect weekend is to be perched in front of your computer reading blogs, buying shit you don't need on Amazon, Tweeting and Facebooking, or surfing YouPorn. But at what point are you considered a bona fide Internet addict? To find out, I called up a psychologist and a fancy rehab center who specialize in this type of thing. I must admit there was a part of me that went into reporting this story with a smirk. Internet addiction? Aren't we all Internet addicts to some extent? And then I talked to Coleen Moore of the Illinois Institute of Addiction Recovery, who told me that 20% of all addicts who check into the rehab center are there for Internet addiction. Some of them use drugs along with the Internet so they can stay awake and online longer, and others get urinary tract infections or wet themselves because they don't want to take bathroom breaks. Carpal tunnel and eye strain are only the tip of the iceberg. For some, Internet addiction is a very real psychological issue that calls for medical help.

The compulsion to be online all the time is slightly different than more conventional addictions like alcoholism and prescription drugs, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist who runs the web site NetAddiction.com. "It's not quantitative," she says. "It's not like you can measure how much they're drinking." And while it's more common in people who have other mental health conditions to begin with — staving off depression by surfing online porn, for example — the accessibility of the Internet has also spawned a new population of addicts. "A lot of patients describe situations like this: 'I never thought about porn but then I found it online, and the more I found the more I wanted it,'" says Dr. Young. "It's something very specific to cyberspace — they don't have to go to the adult bookstore in town, it's just right in their rooms."

When Young started treating Internet addiction in 1994, the biggest problem people saw her for was day trading. Now, there are more addicts who show up (voluntarily, or at the heels of concerned parents) for online gaming. "World of Warcraft and Everquest seem to be the ones that individuals identify most often," says Moore, who is the admissions manager at the Illinois Institute. These addicts typically stay at the Institute for 30-90 days, paying up to $1200 a day (though many insurance plans cover at least part of it) to follow the same treatment program that alcoholics and sex addicts go through. "We have a philosophy here that an addiction is an addiction, and that those who suffer from gambling or sex or Internet or alcohol can all learn from one another," Moore says.

There's no concrete definition of what qualifies you as an Internet addict. And because the Internet is such a prevalent part of everyday life now, complete abstinence isn't usually an option. Instead of trying to gauge your addiction level by how long you're online, you're supposed to be looking more at whether your Internet usage is affecting the way you perform in other parts of your life. Are you getting in trouble at work? Is your partner leaving you? Are you forgetting to shower, eat, and pee? If so, you might want to consider getting help.

"An addiction is an addiction," Young says. "It doesn't matter if it's porn or the Internet."

Or, for that matter, if it's porn and the Internet.

You can take Dr. Young's Internet addiction test here.

Advisor is a column about how to juggle technology, relationships, and common sense. Got a story to tell? Email me at lisa [at] boingboing [dot] net.

Harbin, China, home to the Institute of Technology's robot football research group, will host a robot olympics in 2010. According to the BBC News, "Entry to the competition will be restricted to robots resembling humans. They must possess two arms and legs. Wheels are banned."

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.

(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn't nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst's precision and a novelist's sympathy:

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it....

One of last week's more strident posters shared his frustration with members of his on-line forum (yes, I Googled myself, and of course I read all the nasty things they said about me), listing the seminal books I hadn't referenced ("Nafeez Ahmed's "War on Truth," Peter Dale Scott's "Road to 9/11," Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon," Michel Chossudovsky's "War on Terrorism"), pointing out The Complete 9/11 Timeline at historycommons.org that I ignored, and exposing my transparently propagandistic mendacity in allowing one perfervid e-mailer to stand "as an avatar for the supposed pathologies of the 9/11 Truth movement."

Of course he's furious! He's educated, articulate, and politically committed. He's not some disreputable, anti-social obsessive--he's a veritable exegete of 9/11 anomalies, as fluent in the jargon of physics as he is in political dialectics. It's bad enough that he has to endure the studied neutrality or outright hostility of the really big guns of the left--Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein--but then an arrant nobody like me comes along with, as one of his fellow posters put it, "a metric tonne of standard issue boilerplate" and presumes that he can conjure away the whole edifice of 9/11 Truth with a couple of wisecracks. Not only am I smug and ignorant and intellectually dishonest --- it's as if I don't even care about the subtle distinctions between one brand of Truthery and another, as if I can't be bothered to acknowledge the museum's-worth of evidence that he and his colleagues have so assiduously curated.

Imagine that you were a Maria Callas fan. You own every recording she ever made -- 78s, LPs, remastered CDs, even reel-to-reel tapes recorded off of radio broadcasts. You've not only read every book and magazine article about her that was ever committed to print, you've written a few yourself. And then some fly-by-night music journalist casually dismisses her in the pages of a mass circulation magazine as a cracked-voiced diva whose sole claim to fame was that she and Jackie O were rivals for Aristotle Onassis's affections.

Reading through all that commentary, I thought of how misguided missionaries sometimes try to evangelize Jews by calling their attention to passages from the New Testament--a scripture that by definition carries no weight with Jews at all. From my outsider's perspective, most of the Truther's exhibits (the iron spherules, the 2.5 seconds of video-taped free fall, the anecdotes about the dancing Israelis, the housing official trapped in the stairwell of WTC7) aren't evidence at all but rather artifacts of confirmation bias--factoids (many of dubious provenance, some long past their sell-by date) that are plucked out of context and marshaled not to build or close a positive case for one thesis or another, but only to cast doubt on the default position. I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself.

Religious fanatics, political radicals, obsessive fans -- the worlds they live in are closed systems, governed by dogmas and articles of faith. Discipline is strictly enforced; members are punished or purged for their lapses in ideological or doctrinal purity. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion and hostility -- milquetoast accommodationists who are presumptuous enough to suppose they can make common cause on one issue or another even more so than overt enemies. It's a pressure cooker -- turn up the temperature and you get sectarianism and schisms, higher still and you get witch hunts, show trials, Cultural Revolutions, and Nuremberg laws.

With its congeries of black sheep constituencies (Alex Jones Libertarian populists, movement leftists, anarchists, white supremacists, New World Order reactionaries, Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semites, crusading architects and theologians) and its lack of a dominant leader or organization, the 9/11 Movement will likely never become unified enough to tear itself apart. But it has not been altogether innocuous either. "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement," Noam Chomsky said, "Has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state...crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work."

Just as the missionary can't understand how the Jew can contemplate the prospect of his eternal damnation with such unnatural equanimity, the Truther can't fathom why the rest of us would rather look at the forest than the trees. There's a certain poignancy in their predicament. As Hofstadter wrote, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For many years, we've been quite skeptical of any business model in virtual worlds/social networks that rely on "buying virtual goods." That's because these are all based on artificial scarcities, and as we all know (hopefully, by now), relying on artificial scarcities for a business model is incredibly risky, especially once people realize the scarcities are artificial. And yet, over the past few years, a number of businesses have been built on this very premise. In fact, Silicon Valley is crawling these days with businesses built on selling virtual goods, and if you talk to many VCs about it, you'll quickly note that they're positively giddy over the fact that people are paying for this stuff. What they don't seem to realize is that it's unlikely to last.

In the last couple weeks, Mike Arrington, over at TechCrunch, did an amazing job calling attention to the widely known, but rarely discussed in polite company, dark underbelly to most of those business models: quite a large part of their revenue is based on scammy offers that effectively trick unsophisticated purchasers (often kids) into signing up for expensive subscriptions to things they don't want. I was at an investor "roundtable" a couple months ago, which was mostly bankers in suits, and they were laughing about just how gullible people are on these things, and it's great to see TechCrunch exposing them, and pushing the worst abusers to clean up their act. Of course, even when some, like Zynga, claim to be cleaning up their act, Arrington was able to dig up a video where Zynga's CEO proudly talked about the scammy tactics he used -- and then noted that these same scammy tactics showed right back up on Zynga, after the company promised they were gone. Those who use these kinds of tactics may find that while they "bring revenue now," it may be short-lived. Companies that focus on such abusive tactics live to regret it (just ask RealNetworks).

But, the really amazing thing, as pointed out by Dan Lyons/Fake Steve Jobs, in an amazingly un-Fake-Steve-Jobs-like rant, is to compare the series of writeups by Arrington with the love letter to Zynga and other "virtual goods" companies in the NY Times, which came out after most of Arrington's posts, and makes no mention of them at all. As Lyons/FSJ notes:

So: they walked into this shit-storm and somehow, by some miracle, managed not to notice the fecal matter flying all around them. It's like covering a football game that took place in the middle of the blizzard and neglecting to mention the weather.

Now, maybe they did all the reporting before Arrington's stuff broke. In which case they should have gone back and updated their info. Or maybe, just maybe, Zynga's PR people teed up a Times story as a kind of rebuttal to what Arrington was reporting. Either way, that's what ended up happening: Zynga used the Times to deflect the bad shit flying at them from Arrington. They need good press because they're hoping to cash out by going public next year. That story in the Times will be worth millions. Many millions.

Meanwhile, Arrington, still digging, blasted again on Saturday night, reporting that sleazy ads had popped up again on Zynga, despite promises that they would be taken down.

Um, New York Times? If you guys are still wondering why people are dropping their subscriptions and getting their news from blogs instead of you -- this is why.

After which, Lyons/FSJ notes:

And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the "real newspapers" all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we're going to be just fine.... What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times. Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. They're the ones who still dare to go for the throat, while their counterparts at big newspapers just keep reaching for the shrimp cocktail.

Of course, there's just a bit of irony in noting that Dan Lyons wrote one of the quintessential blog bashing articles four years ago, when he was writing for Forbes, at one point suggesting that blogger "journalists" were no different than notorious (NY Times) maker-up-of-stories, Jayson Blair. Nice to see he's coming around to recognizing things perhaps aren't so bad in the blog world.

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Don't want to cut the cable on your Nunchuck or buy a teeny circuit board to do the trick when you have etching capability at home? Instructables user dany32412's Nunchuck Arduino adapter tutorial uses pretty much the same layout as Tod Kurt's, but you make it yourself!

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Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton changes things up today by reviewing The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. Questions that big need a big review and you can learn what Bennett has to say about it all by reading below.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fake Steve Jobs points to the NYT's kid-gloves piece on Zynga, published the same week as bloggers exposed Zynga's scummy doings, as reason number one for Big Print's Decline: "The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit."

For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to index you. Until you do, stop whining and put it back in your pants."

Now Rupert has promised to do exactly that. He claims that he's going to take all of News Corp's websites pay-only and have them removed from Google when he does.

You know what? He's lying. But I think it'd be entertaining if every reporter who interviewed him, for the rest of his life, said, "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to take all your company's websites out of Google?" It'd also be hilarious to get the CEOs of the various pieces of Rupert's empire to comment on whether they want all their company's materials invisible to search engines.

Rupert also thinks that fair use is illegal and that the right court case would result in it being "barred altogether." Again, another hilarious interview question for the rest of his career: "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to abolish fair use? How's that plan coming, pal?"

The revelation came early in the interview, after Murdoch claimed that Google and others are stealing News Corp content in response to a question about who he was talking about when he talked about plagiarists. "The people who simply pick up everything to run with, and steal our stories...they just take them..without payment. That's Google, Microsoft, Ask.com..a whole lot of people."

Murdoch claimed that readers who visit News Corp sites via search offer little value to advertisers, and that News Corp would rather have fewer people coming to their websites, but paying. Asked why News hasn't made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: "I think we will....but that's when we start charging."

Murdoch also claims that News Corp believes that the doctrine of Fair Use can be challenged in court and "barred altogether."

Epic Win: News Corp Likely To Remove Content From Google (Thanks, Dustin!)

Update: So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

On this fair use question, my guess is that some evil Richelieu in the legal department has been passing torrid whispers to Rupert about how the Berne Convention's "Three Step Test" for exceptions to copyright is overstepped by US fair use and by many countries' fair dealing rules. So Rupert thinks that he can take a case to the WTO (membership in the WTO is contingent on compliance with the Berne Convention) and get all these rules struck down.

Of course, Rupert's own media products make frequent and copious fair use of other copyrights -- you can't create without fair use. But the mustache-twirling lawyer at Newscorp probably didn't mention this to Rupert Palpatine (the lawyer probably thinks it'd be OK if every single one of those fair uses was replaced by a process in which lots of lawyers negotiated the terms of every use, probably all reporting to him).

They're wrong, of course. The WTO's rules -- and Berne -- are necessarily subservient to realpolitik, viz., the US gets $1 trillion of economic activity out of fair use, and it's not going to get rid of it because it makes some UN agency sad (if the UN mattered to the US, the US'd be paying the billions in back-fees it owes). And if the WTO imposes trade sanctions on the US, they'll just be ignored, because the world's factory-states (China, with also-rans such as India and Vietnam) can't afford to stop sending shipping containers full of Happy Meal toys to America. And if the WTO tries to embargo China, it'll quickly discover that the rest of the world isn't prepared to live without plastic tchotchkes and junkware either.

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.

And we thought that perhaps -- just perhaps -- Rupert Murdoch was coming to his senses with the plan to delay putting up a paywall. Turns out that may have been wishful thinking. Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that Murodch has suggested that News Corp. might actually remove its sites from Google. Of course, I won't actually believe it until it happens, but he has had his minions going around slamming Google even as News Corp. offers its own aggregators. But actually following through and removing News Corp's sites from Google would be a huge step to take -- though one right off the side of a big cliff. Still, I'm sure it would make for a fun case study.

In the meantime, his explanation is really quite stunning. He claims that he believes fair use is a concept that the courts will reject:

"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether..."

Wow. Of course, if that's true, then (again) we need to point out that News Corp. has been making use of fair use for years with its own aggregators. In fact, most news organizations regularly make use of fair use. Perhaps News Corps' lawyers who work in their news divisions might want to sit Murdoch down and explain the importance of fair use from a reporting perspective. They might also want to point him to the history of fair use within copyright law, in case he thinks it's something that was just made up yesterday.

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Reaching for your glasses won't help you read this book. Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, written by Robert Chaplin, is written on tablets only 11x15 microns (1/1000 of a millimeter) wide. That means that you will need an electron microscope to read it. Though it was created back in 2007, this is the first I have heard of it.

To make the book, a focused ion beam machine was used to carve the pages into tablets of single-crystal silicon. It's a pretty impressive feat to print an entire book in less than 7000 square microns, however I wonder how much physical space it would take to store it in digital form on a modern flash drive. Anyone know the calculation? [via international exhibition of calligraphy]

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clickclickdrone writes to mention that "road trains," a system linking vehicles together via wireless sensors could soon be rolled out in Europe. The system is designed primarily at cutting fuel consumption, travel time, and congestion. "Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles. Tom Robinson, project co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo, said the idea was to use off-the-shelf components to make it possible for cars, buses and trucks to join the road train."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mind Hacks blog Googles the phrase "psychologist says", with headesky results. The problem: "Psychologist" doesn't always mean what you think it means. Some stories quoted from peer-reviewed research, others turned to therapists with little-to-no academic or research experience, and everything in between.

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)

Since the release of Baldur's Gate in 1998, BioWare has cultivated a strong reputation for quality role-playing games, exploring various aspects of the genre ranging from traditional D&D roles and rules to space marine and Jedi Knights. Dragon Age: Origins is a shift back to traditional swords-and-sorcery standards, unashamedly embracing the archetypes that made RPGs what they are, and using them to tell a complex, interesting story in familiar yet unexplored world. In addition, BioWare has done yet another iteration of their combat system to make it deeper and allow the player to dictate the level of engagement. The result is that Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best RPGs in recent history. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although I'll admit to some cognitive dissonance at the notion of an expensive custom-made object intended to evoke homelessness, there's no denying the purely aesthetic qualities of this fireplace by John Briscella. I'd really like to see what it looks like with a fire burning inside, and, while I'm at it, maybe some video of the 5-axis laser cutting out all those little pieces... [via Dude Craft]

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"The person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this." The storm unleashed by a blog post exploring a model in which loans go to microfinance institutions, not necessarily the specific Mr. goat herder or Ms. cassava farmer upon whose face you click. (NYT)

This menu from a Chinese and Japanese restaurant in Massachussetts invites you to try Item C14, "Beef Brisket in Wikipedia Flavor." (Consumerist via Susannah Breslin)

Last year, we wrote about Microsoft's COFEE tools, which are a set of computer forensic and auditing tools that Microsoft puts on a USB key and gives to law enforcement to use in trying to extract info from a computer. There was some fear that it was a "back door," but people insisted it was no such thing, but just a collection of basic tools. Still, the fact that the system was promoted as being useful for decrypting passwords and analyzing a computer's data and internet activity seemed troubling. We noted that if Microsoft was giving it out to law enforcement, it seemed likely that others would have access to it as well.

Well, late last week, reports started showing up noting that COFEE itself had been leaked to various file sharing sites. Apparently, the program had been quite sought after at private tracker What.cd -- though, after it was leaked there, the admins actually removed the torrent.

Still, you have to imagine that the software is very much out there. So, the question still remains, is this a big deal or not? When we did our original post, many people insisted that there was no big deal in Microsoft COFEE and it was just basic everyday auditing software. Yet, when even What.cd is removing the torrent, claiming they "didn't like" what they saw when they examined the software, in terms of "the potential impact on the site and security of our users and staff," it does raise certain questions that are similar to those we originally raised.

So, once again, let's get some feedback from the folks reading here. Is this really a big deal? Or is it just your ordinary tools?

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I wrote two pieces over the weekend on the new Droidie blog.

1. Net-net: I love the Droid.

2. The holy grail in communicating cameras.

3. Press Up to Play? Huh?? Wazzat!?

halfEvilTech writes 'Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jack Daws made ten counterfeit pennies from gold for an art show in LA in 2007. He put one of the pennies into circulation at the airport, possibly never to see it again. Well, just last month, Jessica in Brooklyn found the penny, which is worth about a hundred dollars.

"The artwork looks like a real penny, except due to the casting process, it's slightly smaller, and because of the gold's weight, it's almost twice as heavy....Anyone interested in looking for the piece... should look for a penny dated 1970, with no mint mark."

I looked at the penny I'd found. Date stamp, 1970. No mint mark.

Seriously?! I needed more. Pennies minted in San Francisco do not have mint marks, and pennies minted in 1970 are the opposite of rare.

Next test: I took the penny to the kitchen and pulled out my digital scale. 3 grams.

Sure enough, a 1972 penny weighed in at 2 grams.

I honestly thought there was no way it could be "the" penny. The chance of it being found seemed too great. The chance of my having found it seemed to great. Still, I went to the website of the Seattle gallery that represents Daws, Greg Kucera Gallery, to see if any further information was available, any sure tell that I had indeed found not only the penny, but a really good story as well.

Check out the full story at The Stranger.

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Yesterday, my husband went hunting around the Internets for a new dining room lamp. This is one of the options he presented me with. Only $189. Cheap!

Sadly, no Battlestar model is available. Or a Death Star. I might have gone for a Death Star.

Star Ship Chandelier from eLights

I wanted an easier way to subscribe to feeds..

So I wrote down the way way I wanted it to work and this is what I came up with.

I'm on a site and think "Gee I'd like to subscribe to this." I see it's got an XML icon in the address bar.

I click on a Bookmarklet and after a few seconds, am transported to the Feeds page in River2. To subscribe, I just click the Submit button.

So that's how I made it work! :-)

http://newsriver.org/bookmarklet.html

Boom!

A bunch of folks have submitted this recent Washington Post article about the growing anger and resentment towards red light and speed cameras. We've posted similar articles in the past, but this is one of the first times I've seen the topic discussed in a major mainstream paper. The discussion basically hits on all the high points, showing that people really hate the devices and that the reason they're so popular is not safety, but revenue. It also looks at the stats, talking about a few different studies. It does mention one study claiming that the cameras have decreased accidents and fatalities, but then notes numerous other studies that disagree, and digs into the details of the original study to find that it does not account for multiple other factors. At best, the studies seem to indicate that red light and speed cameras do not decrease accident rates (in one damning study, a town that got rid of its cameras so a bigger decrease in accidents than a neighboring town that installed them). In the end, it's quite clear that the cameras are entirely about money, and have nothing to do with safety -- and it's nice to see more people recognizing this issue.

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An anonymous reader writes ""By 2030 [Japan] wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves. The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GetLoFi shares their steps for home PCB-making using mostly common tools and materials, beginning with a trip to Staples to print transfer sheets and finally dividing the boards with a paper cutter. For more on their process, be sure to check out the all three parts of the video tutorial. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

chopsuei3 writes 'As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system. What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency? Measurements such as uptime and average page latency are useful, but our site is relatively stable and we see minimal downtime, so I'm looking for other important and useful information I can report up to better illustrate my efforts. Our system is also unique in that about 70% of the traffic we see is from devices and not human browsers. I am a lone System Administrator in a 20 person company which specializes in web based irrigation management. I also simultaneously perform all IT related tasks in the office, which may also be important to report up to executives on regular basis.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dementia writes in to point out the rather ironic situation of a "free" concert put on by the band U2, at the remains of the Berlin Wall in order to celebrate the demise of the wall... but MTV decided to put up a big temporary barrier around the event so those who didn't have free tickets could not even see the event. Yes, they erected a special "wall" to block out a free concert about The Wall. As Dementia noted with the submission, "you're doing it wrong..."

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Hasbro is having a contest to see who can build the best Star Wars diorama using "at least five 3 3/4" Hasbro Star Wars figures and or vehicles." Submissions are open until November 16. See the official rules (.pdf). [via Geekologie]

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destinyland writes "A Vermont city once proposed a one-mile dome over its 7,000 residents. (They paid $4 million a year in heating bills, and HUD seriously considered funding their proposal.) The city's architectural concept included supporting the Dome with air pressure slightly above atmospheric pressure. (Buckminster Fuller warned their biggest challenge would be keeping it from floating away...) There would be no more heating bills, fly-fishing all year, and no more snow shoveling. And to this day, the former city planner insists that 'Economically it's a slam dunk.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

destinyland writes "A Vermont city once proposed a one-mile dome over its 7,000 residents. (They paid $4 million a year in heating bills, and HUD seriously considered funding their proposal.) The city's architectural concept included supporting the Dome with air pressure slightly above atmospheric pressure. (Buckminster Fuller warned their biggest challenge would be keeping it from floating away...) There would be no more heating bills, fly-fishing all year, and no more snow shoveling. And to this day, the former city planner insists that 'Economically it's a slam dunk.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tank is already accepting submissions for Bent 2010 : The 7th Annual Circuit Bending Festival -

Tentative Festival Dates: New York, NY Bent Festival - April 22, 23, and 24 Proposal Deadline: December 1, 2009 Participant Notification: December 11, 2009 In keeping with the expanding interests of the community, this year we are continuing to open the Bent Festival to performers and artists that create their own electronics as well as to those who hack, bend, modify and destroy them. We are currently seeking performers and artists to participate specifically in these categories: Performers, Installation Artists, Artwork Submissions and Workshop Instructors. Please send all proposals and questions to: New York Bent Festival - bentnyc@thetanknyc.org

Read on for more infos -

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Pickens writes "Tom Bradley reports in PC World that the new Motorola Droid smartphone will cost users $199.99 with a 2-year contract, with an additional $30 per month for the mandatory 'unlimited' data plan that has a monthly cap of 5Gb. Verizon will charge $50 for each additional gigabyte over the 5Gb limit on the unlimited data plan. Verizon has confirmed that tethering will cost another $30 per month for an additional unlimited data plan that is also limited to 5Gb. If you want tethering you will pay $60 above and beyond the monthly contract for service for an 'unlimited' 10Gb of data per month, and if you plan on connecting with an Microsoft Exchange email account you have to pay another $15 a month. 'Verizon seems to be doing everything it can to make the Droid as unappealing as possible by nickel and diming customers so that actually using it is not cost-effective,' writes Bradley. 'After all of the hype around Verizon's marketing efforts, and generally favorable reviews of the Motorola Droid, users that rush out to get the new device may be in for a shock.' Droid users will have to wait until sometime in 2010 for tethering. 'That service is on our schedule for next year,' says Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney. The delay is because 'the service has to be tested on the phone so until we know it works, we don't offer the service. It is not uncommon for us to introduce the phone and continue to test the service and offer it later.'"

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The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

william was the first of a few of you to send in this story about how Infinity Ward seems to have decided to piss off a bunch of fans of the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 by not allowing dedicated game servers, limiting the number of players for PC-based multiplayer games and other limiting features. In one telling quote, one of the game's designers was asked about whether or not a certain feature would be enabled to allow players to change their field of view, and was told:

We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

Now, that's fair enough, but if those fans don't want to play the game that way, they're not going to play it at all.

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Hot on the heals of the recent release of a mobile image editing app for the iPhone, Adobe unveils its photoshop.com mobile for Android. [via phandroid]

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Pentax Europe is to establish its own online stores to provide wider availability of its products. The move will allow the company to sell cameras directly to consumers in UK, Germany France, Switzerland and Hungary. Online shopping specialist Digital River has signed an agreement with Pentax Europe to launch an online store and provide e-commerce services to support online sales of cameras starting before the end of the year. Pentax has struggled to achieve widespread distribution in some European markets in recent years.

The deceptively simple coil proves incredibly useful in the world of electronics - the inductor's ability to store energy in an electromagnetic field is the key to making transformers, electromagnets, and many more components work. It truly is an awesome device!

I knew little of how inductors worked before starting out on this vid. In fact, none of the circuits I've built ever called for them specifically. But after a bit of research, I was honestly amazed to learn how they work. The process of mutual induction even inspired this little action-painting/diagram -

As always, feel free to leave a comment with your ideas/experiences/corrections/take on the matter.

Download the m4v file or subscribe in iTunes

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Here's an interesting image from a science photo stock art site, know what's going on here? Click through to see if you're right...

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This novel approach to cellphone microscopy from Dr. Aydogan Ozcan from the University of California, Los Angeles, foregoes bulky lenses and magnifies electronically.

For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone's camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.

Far From a Lab? Turn a Cellphone Into a Microscope [via picturephoning]

More:
Cameraphone microscope extension revisited
Cell phone camera turned remote microscope

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fatnickc writes "The UK's Channel 4, from the 16th of September, will be broadcasting a few programmes in 3D, the full list of which can be found here. While the likes of a 3D Miley Cyrus concert aren't exactly groundbreaking, this will give 3D viewing at home much more publicity, paving the way for even more interesting projects in the future. In partnership with retailer Sainsbury's, Channel 4 are producing free 3D glasses so that as many people as possible can watch them, although it's unclear which of the various types they'll be. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fatnickc writes "The UK's Channel 4, from the 16th of September, will be broadcasting a few programmes in 3D, the full list of which can be found here. While the likes of a 3D Miley Cyrus concert aren't exactly groundbreaking, this will give 3D viewing at home much more publicity, paving the way for even more interesting projects in the future. In partnership with retailer Sainsbury's, Channel 4 are producing free 3D glasses so that as many people as possible can watch them, although it's unclear which of the various types they'll be. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the RIAA has backed down (but not stopped) lawsuits against those accused of file sharing in the US, it looks like the Danish anti-piracy bureau has decided to drop all of its lawsuits after it became clear that individuals were basically winning them all (Google translation of the original, found via brokep). Basically, the courts acquitted most of the individuals accused of private file sharing, with the one exception being the case where the guy confessed. And, the nature of the rulings in the acquittals made it clear that it was virtually impossible to win a lawsuit against individuals for file sharing. Of course, we have no doubt that the industry will continue to use other means, such as via regulatory capture, to continue to look for ways not to give consumers what they want.

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The Maker Shed now stocks a variety of ERECTOR sets. They make a great gift for you your aspiring engineer, or any 'little maker' this holiday season. We stock the 252 piece set, 352 piece set, and the giant 605 piece set.

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antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"

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This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon.

If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing (via Beyond the Beyond)

This early (1927) color film shows 10 minutes of remarkable vintage London -- especially the Petticoat Lane market scenes around 6:00, which are a rare glimpse into the life of everyday people (it's even cooler if you were actually down on Petticoat Lane yesterday, as I was!).

The Open Road London (1927) (via Making Light)

Dan Gillmor sez, "Slow food was a great idea. Maybe we need 'slow news' in an era of accelerating -- and wrong -- information."

Like many other people who've been burned by believing too quickly, I've learned to put almost all of what journalists call "breaking news" into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, "interesting if true." That is, even though I gobble up "the latest" from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it's unreliable if not false.

It's my own version of "slow news" -- an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day...

But this isn't about saving the old guard. It's mostly about persuading audiences to, among other things, "take a deep breath" before leaping to conclusions, as PaidContent's Staci Kramer tweeted. (I don't trust journalists to do this anymore, with too few exceptions.)

In a practical sense, we can help it along if we find ways to preserve a happy by-product of the manufacturing process. Or, as Clay puts it in an email, "the idea -- that we have to get back, by design, the kinds of things we used to get as side-effects of the environment -- is so important right now, and especially for news."

Toward a Slow-News Movement (Thanks, Dan!)

CCrawford sez, "Michelle Khine couldn't afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem."

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.

A children's toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips (Thanks, CCrawford!)

(Image: Dave Lauridsen)

Noah sez, "An interview with the man who designed the ambient sound at Disney World, ensuring a constant experience rather than one that ends with the end of the ride. It was initially a little uneven, with sound changing volumes depending on where you stood, so they used algorithms to position 15,000 speakers around the park so that the levels would never change."

I like the way there's often running water or waterfalls between different soundscapes to act as a white-noise buffer. It's subtle but incredibly effective. You almost never hear two contrasting soundscapes at once.

In the mid 1990's, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.

As we land, I ask Mr Q what he considers the highlight of his career. He describes how he wrote some software for "manufacturing emotion" with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion (Thanks, Noah!)

On the Day of the Dead (Dia de Finados) in Brazil, Ademir Jorge Goncalves walked into his own funeral. His family had thought he had died in a car wreck but Goncalves had actually been out drinking. According to CNN, "the sight of... Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out of the windows of the funeral home in southern Brazil."

uyguremre writes "After a little over a year and a half in the making, the developers of MythTV announced that MythTV 0.22 is now available. There have been a lot of large changes since 0.21, including a port from Qt v3 to Qt v4 and a major UI rewrite to convert to MythTV's new MythUI user interface libary. As always, this release adds support for some new hardware, in this case VDPAU video acceleration, DVB-S2, and the Hauppauge HD-PVR. The MythUI toolkit allows themes much greater control over the user interface and today we're announcing a competition to design new themes for MythTV. With the new release comes a theming competition too. For a more complete list of changes and new features, read the Release Notes on the wiki."

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From Flickr user necromancer7. [via The Brothers Brick]

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There's a meme going around about fathers and the coolest things they did when you were growing up.

Since Father's Day on October 3, I guess I've been reflecting on this stuff more than usual, and I have a story prepared. But first, my father actually had an opinion about this, he told a story that embarassed me about how he taught me to kiss. But I'm sure I thought it was cool when I was a toddler. Kids go for that kind of stuff. But the word we're looking for is "cool" and from my point of view, as an adult, here's the coolest thing my dad did.

Probably 1970 or 71. I was more than a bit of a rebellious teenager. So one day I got suspended from high school for bringing a bottle of wine to school. I was drinking with some friends in the yard before home room when the Dean of Discipline, Joey Cotter, comes walking out, takes the bottle, escorts me to his office and calls my father to come get me. My dad drives to the Bronx from Queens, and I thought for sure I'm really going to catch it now, cause not only was I drinking wine in school, but it was his wine. I had stolen it from him. Oy.

Well, my dad comes in, and instead of giving me shit, he tells off Cotter. He says why don't you leave the kids alone. My chin dropped to the floor. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. I thought I had moved to a different planet. The Dean thought so too, he was speechless. (He and I were enemies, I was, as you might imagine, and a major troublemaker. He thought he had me, but heh he no he didn't.)

So that has to be the coolest thing. On the drive home we talked about baseball and the weather, and he never punished me for taking the wine.

Update: Cotter died in Y2K.

Firs it was "The Manga Guide to Statistics" then it was "The Manga Guide to Electricity" ...and now, Lisp Manga.

Lisp (or LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older.

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"Getting enough sleep, on a regular cycle, may make us a better version of ourselves. And even though my greatest wish is usually more time in the day, I'd rather feel good and perform well than get to be a crankier, impulsive, sick version of myself for a few extra hours a day."

"Getting enough sleep, on a regular cycle, may make us a better version of ourselves. And even though my greatest wish is usually more time in the day, I'd rather feel good and perform well than get to be a crankier, impulsive, sick version of myself for a few extra hours a day."

Hugh Pickens writes "CBS reports on 60 minutes that a massive two-day power outage in Brazil's Espirito Santo State affecting more than three million people in 2007, and another, smaller event in three cities north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, were perpetrated by hackers manipulating control systems. Former Chief of US National Intelligence Retired Adm. Mike McConnell says that the 'United States is not prepared for such an attack' and believes it could happen in America. 'If I were an attacker and wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer,' says McConnell, 'I would probably sack electric power on the US East Coast, maybe the West Coast and attempt to cause a cascading effect.' Congressman Jim Langevin says that US power companies need to be forced to deal with the issue after they told Congress they would take steps to defend their operations but did not follow up. 'They admit that they misled Congress. The private sector has different priorities than we do in providing security. Their bottom line is about profits,' says Langevin. 'We need to change their motivation so that when see vulnerability like this, we can require them to fix it.' McConnell adds that a similar attack to the one in Brazil is poised to take place on US soil and that it may take some horrific event to get the country focused on shoring up cyber security. 'If the power grid was taken off line in the middle of winter and it caused people to suffer and die, that would galvanize the nation. I hope we don't get there.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.