Jeff Simmermon says:

I worked as an offsider (assistant) to a kangaroo shooter in the Australian Outback in early 2004. It was dirty, disgusting, blood-soaked work and it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of that experience in some way or another. It taught me a lot: I learned to get tough, how to do some hard, hard work, and how to put aside all my delicate city liberal ideas and face the realities of the food chain.

Kangaroos are pests in Australia, and people eat their meat all the time. And meat does not just cheerfully lie itself down on the burger bun, either. Kangaroo meat is as free-range and organic as it gets, but you’ve still got to do a fair bit of old-fashioned killing to make it happen — and the process is disturbing, gory, and pretty hideous. Not unlike the rest of nature, the parts they don’t show you on the television programs.

Roo Shooter

Allison K alerts us to the news that Verizon is the latest US broadband provider to agree to pass along the RIAA letters accusing Verizon customers of unauthorized file sharing. AT&T, Comcast, Cox and some other ISPs already do this. The letters don't include specific threats of action (so, no "three strikes" type policies), but the RIAA is clearly hoping that by passing on the letters it will discourage unauthorized file sharing. It's a bit of a waste for Verizon to need to spend resources on this, and it really is just the RIAA's first step in the door to eventually push for kicking people off of the internet, but on the whole it's not that terrible to pass along notices. In the end, my guess is that it will actually serve to do a lot more to promote encryption services than anything else. Maybe some encryption service can approach Verizon about "sponsoring" those customer notifications.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

I love etching my own PCBs. It's a great way to incorporate some of art-school skills with my love for DIY electronics. Up until now, I'd always used traditional ferric chloride to etch my boards, though I'd heard many sing the praises of an alternative etchant easily made from common ingredients. Tired of mail-ordering ferric and dealing with proper disposal, I decided to give cupric chloride a try.

Following Open Circuits' recipe, I picked up some muriatic acid from the local hardware store and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide 3% from the pharmacy. After setting up next to my big window fan, I slowly added 16oz of the muriatic to an equal amount hydrogen peroxide, resulting in a clear solution. Shortly after immersing my masked PCB and agitating a bit, the etchant turned a brilliant green hue as it began work on the exposed copper. Several minutes of gentle sloshing left me with a perfectly etched board - plus a etchant that can will last me a very long time. For me, that's the real 'selling point' of cupric chloride - by oxygenating (air-bubbling) or adding some more H2O2 to the solution, I'll be able to refresh this batch once it's spent - awesome. I'm left wondering why I hadn't tried this sooner!

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Two stories on "fast news," and how the rush to press in the Fort Hood story may have led to major inaccuracies. ProPublica: "Remember the hero female cop who shot Hasan? Well, maybe she did and maybe she didn't." And, NYT: "Another officer, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, 42, said (...) he fired the shots that brought down the gunman after Sergeant Munley was seriously wounded."

typosquatting writes to mention that the largest domain dispute case since the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) was enacted ten years ago has been decided. The decision saw 1,017 cyber-squatting domains turned over to ConsumerInfo.com, owner of FreeCreditReport.com. The full decision can be read via the National Arbitration Forum website. "It would seem that this decision sets or reinforces a fairly strong precedent that trademark holders may be entitled to, not only to the domain name that exactly matches their trademark, but also to a wide swath of other domain names including nearly every possible misspelling or other variation of that trademark, potentially even if the trademark is comprised of generic words."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a Design News Gadget Freak column on using an ARM-powered processor (the MBED ARM Cortex-M3 MCU Dev Board) to make a Billy Bass animatronic fish speak and move as you wish. [Caution: mild cursing in the video.]

Gadget Freak Case #150: Hotrod Your Billy Bass

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A few months ago, when Google launched its "Street View" tool in Switzerland, the government got upset and told Google to take the site down because it violated people's privacy. This was despite the fact that Google had been discussing the project with the government and put in place multiple privacy safeguards, including blurring faces and license plates. Apparently, it wasn't enough. Mr. LemurBoy alerts us to the news that Switzerland is now taking Google to court over Street View, claiming that it doesn't blur people enough, and that sometimes the cameras can see over fences or walls. Of course, anyone walking down the street can see the same things as well, and if they're tall enough, they can see over walls. Is Switzerland going to take tall people to court as well?

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We've posted before about Dock Ellis. He was the baseball player who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping balls on LSD. Ellis died last year. In his honor, James Blagden and Chris Isenberg animated Ellis's retelling of his acid adventure on the mound. "Dock Ellis's Legendary LSD No-Hitter animation" (Dangerous Minds)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Looks like the Austin-area Handmade event series is going strong, not to be missed for those local -

We’ll be building 4ms’ Autonomous Bassline Generator. The upper division class is filled but there should be some space in the beginner class. Even if there aren’t any seats available, there will be all kinds of things happening in the gallery space for EAST. You can play with the Thingamagoop 2, Eric Archer’s noisemakers, Andromeda Space Rocker kits as well as other handmade instuments.

More details over at Handmade Music.

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johanneswilm writes "Nicaragua is the second-poorest country of the Americas. It is now also the Latin American country with the most capable web-based information system for agriculture, thanks to open source software. ALBAstryde itself is open source, and it is based on Django and jQuery. It allows the user to play with the data, and its reach is further extended by a net of radio stations which are broadcasting the numbers to remote peasants, who thereby, for the first time ever, get up to date data on prices and general production levels in the country. The implementation for the ministry of agriculture of Nicaragua already contains live data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have been sending in versions of this story about new EU cookie rules that will require anyone placing cookies on your computer to first get consent. This is the sort of law that is passed by people who don't understand the technology at all, and misinterpret "cookies" as automatically being malicious. This is the sort of thing that people who were first understanding the web got concerned about a decade ago, until they realized it was nothing to worry about. Except... it appears some people haven't quite figured that out yet, and tragically, they make laws in the EU.

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WesternActor writes "ExtremeTech has an interview with a couple of the folks behind Nvidia's new RealityServer platform, which purports to make photorealistic 3D images available to anyone on any computing platform, even things like smartphones. The idea is that all the rendering happens 'in the cloud,' which allows for a much wider distribution of high-quality images. RealityServer isn't released until November 30, but it looks like it could be interesting. The article has photos and a video that show it in action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Verdict: Horrid.

Want to fly your plane or drive your car using GPS signals, but finding that your receiver just isn't accurate enough to make things work? Well, MAKE subscriber Bruce Mueller writes in to point us at an impressive solution: an open-source real time kinematic GPS receiver. Researchers Tomoji Takasu and Akio Yasuda of Tokyo University developed the RTKLIB library to perform the RTK-GPS calculations, and then ported the whole thing to run on a low-cost beagle board and commodity GPS receiver. Want to try it out? Full source code, circuit layouts and instructions are provided on their site.

So, how does it work? A GPS receiver normally works by measuring the delay between an internally generated signal and one received by a satellite. This specially crafted signal makes it possible for the GPS receiver to find and latch onto the satellites signal, however it's wavelength limits the accuracy of the receiver. The real time kinematic system gets around this limitation by measuring the phase delay in the carrier signal. Because this signal has a much sorter wavelength, it is possible to make a system that is accurate to the centimeter.

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ZipK writes "With their former boss cooling his heels on a 150-year sentence, programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez are now in the U.S. Attorney's crosshairs. They've been arrested and charged with 'criminal conspiracy, accused of producing false documents and trading records at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in New York.' Apparently Madoff's fraud was too large and too complex to be foisted entirely by hand."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were a bit surprised, recently, to hear at a WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) meeting that they actually appeared to be taking more of an evidence-based approach to copyright, rather than just assuming that "more is better." And now, the Director General of WIPO, Francis Gurry, gave an interview where he explained why he thought that high fines and jailtime weren't the answer to piracy. He's exactly right, which is a bit surprising. But as you read the details, it sounds like he might be right for the wrong reasons -- which isn't all that surprising.

It's not that he thinks that the better approach is for companies and content creators to adjust their business models -- but that he's afraid the draconian punishment schemes are basically a PR nightmare for WIPO's continuing fruitless effort to convince people that infringement is evil:

"I don't believe we are going to win this, (to) find the solution by putting teenagers in jail," Gurry said in an interview on a visit to India. "I think that is not going to win public sympathy."

"Part of the battle here is to sensitise the public to the fact that there is a real issue involved. It is not simply a victimless crime...."

Amusingly, the whole reason the RIAA kicked off its lawsuit strategy was based on similar thinking: that it was an "education" campaign that would convince people that there was "harm" done from file sharing. Of course, it didn't work. At all. And no education campaign is going to work, because it's just the basic nature of economics. If the technology has made the product infinite, it's not a moral issue or a legal issue: it's a business model issue. The answer is to change business models, not hope and pray that you can somehow convince people that it's "bad" to do something that obviously can be done quite easily.

So, yes, Gurry is correct that draconian punishment has created a massive PR backlash that has helped make things even worse, but an education campaign isn't going to make a difference. Only a business model change can fix a business model situation -- and we're already seeing that happen just fine in many parts of the world. It's not an education campaign that will help the content industry. It's smarter business models.

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NASA found water on the moon! For real! A "significant amount," in fact! (CNN)

Over at the Imaginary Foundation blog, amazingly surreal photos by French artist Frédéric Lebain who superimposes his photographs on top of the real world.

Martin Ecker writes "The “OpenGL Shading Language” (also called the Orange Book because of its orange cover) is back in its meanwhile third edition with updated discussions of the OpenGL shading language up to version 1.40 introduced with OpenGL 3.1. Like the previous edition, the third edition of the book is one of the best introductions to GLSL — the OpenGL Shading Language — that not only teaches the ins and outs of GLSL itself but also explains in-depth how to develop shaders in GLSL for lighting, shadows, animation, and other topics relevant to real-time computer graphics." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although it sounds like some kind of euphemism from Brave New World, a "pneumatic trough" is actually a very handy piece of classic chemistry lab kit. Besides providing a convenient means to collect samples of pure gases for various experiments, a pneumatic trough with a graduated container allows the easy volumetric measurement of reaction yields for gas-producing reactions.

If that all sounds too complicated, don't sweat. What I'm going to show in this tutorial is simply how to build a simple piece of apparatus that allows you to collect pure gas samples over water. You can collect carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen--almost any gas you can generate and direct down a hose.

It seems like a simple enough bit of equipment: all you need is an upside down container suspended in a bucket of water. Finding a convenient way to set that up, however, is tougher than it sounds. The pneumatic trough presented here, which uses a sheet metal "bridge" to secure the glass column, is by far the most painless and economical way to make it work that I have found. The basic idea is derived from illustrations in Robert Brent's 1960 Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (from which the title diagram is taken), but the addition of an aperture shaped to accept the threads of a glass jar is of my own devising.

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BB's favorite robot painter, er rather... painter of robots Brian Despain has a show of new paintings opening tonight, November 13, at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Above, "The Prodigal Son" (oil on panel, 15" x 19").Also showing is John Brophy, whose paintings mixes up iconography from various cultures and religions in a bowl of consumer culture. The full show is viewable online. Brian Despain and John Brophy

This one's from a few months back, but still quite interesting. Danny submitted this story of a series of lawsuits between a musician and a town tourism board over a song the singer apparently wrote. The backstory is that the musician, Cheryl Janky, was a member of a doo wop band called Stormy Weather (perhaps that should have been a warning), who had, as a founder and singer, a guy named Henry Farag. Janky wrote a song called "Wonders of Indiana." With Farag's help, the song was modified to become "Lake County, Indiana," "a doo-wop ode to the border county that rhymes 'ethnic diversity' with 'Hoosier hospitality.'" Farag then did a deal with the tourism board of Lake County, who bought 1,500 copies of the band's CD to sell in its gift shop, and used the song as hold music for callers. The tourism board also had the band (with Janky in it) perform at the opening of of the tourism board's new center. That all happened in 1999.

In 2003, however, Janky left the band, and suddenly was pissed off about how "her" song was being used. She filed a lawsuit in 2003, and since then:

The case has spawned at least three lawsuits, thousands of dollars in judge-ordered sanctions against the woman's attorneys, a three-day trial, estimated legal fees of more than $500,000, reams of paperwork and a subpoena issued to a federal judge.

And for what? Farag notes that the band sold less than 2,000 CDs total (most of which seem to be from the tourism board's purchase). And yet, Janky continues to pursue the case, with her lawyer insisting she needs to do this to "stand up for her creative rights." Meanwhile, this is the same lawyer who apparently "has been sanctioned twice by separate judges in the case for filing frivolous claims and last month was ordered to put down a $5,000 deposit before filing more lawsuits on Janky's behalf 'to cover the high probability of additional sanctions.'"

Ah, the crazy things that a misunderstanding of copyright makes people do.

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NASA is reporting that preliminary data from the LCROSS mission indicates that there really is water in one of the permanently shadowed lunar craters just as they suspected back in September. "'We are ecstatic,' said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. 'Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to this story on mental_floss, nothing is more American than Mom, apple pie, and the freedom to wipe your butt with commercially produced toilet paper.

I'm thrilled to share the EyeWriter with you all:

Behold the latest ocular assault weapon from the Graffiti Research Lab, openFrameworks, The Fat Lab and The Ebeling Group: The EyeWriter. It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus + custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.

The goal of the hardware component of the EyeWriter project is to make the most simple and inexpensive eye-tracking head-set possible to use with the "EyeWriter" software suite. Obviously, there are numerous ways to make eye-tracking hardware. Many of these designs, especially those produced for academic research projects (Open Eyes ), have already been published openly on the internet.

Our functional design specifications are as follows:

1. The EyeWriter should be as inexpensive as possible
2. The fabrication and assembly of the system should require only common hand tools
3. Whenever possible components and parts should be available for purchase locally versus online
4. The camera should produce 640 x 480 NTSC video
5. The camera should be sensitive to near-field IR light
6. The camera should not auto-iris (or auto-iris should be disabled in the camera's driver).
7. IR LEDs should be used to illuminate the pupil

Beyond that its up to you... this instruction set details a solderless variation of the EyeWriter that uses a hacked PS3 Eye and a pair of stunnas we bought on Venice Beach and suggests other possible EyeWriter configurations.

Yes, that's right, watch TemptOne tag buildings (with light) even though he can only move his eyes. We live in the future, and this project makes me feel so warm inside. The whole project is open source.

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angry tapir writes with news of Fujitsu's new phone which is taking the sliding phone keyboard a step further by allowing it to detach completely. "The F-04B was announced as part of NTT DoCoMo's new line-up and is scheduled to hit Japanese shelves in March or April next year. At first glance it looks like a conventional slider cell phone: grab onto the bottom of the phone and a numeric keypad slides out. But decouple a catch and the entire back half of the phone can be pulled off."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well this is a bit of a surprise. For all the talk we keep hearing about how piracy is destroying the video game industry, and news stories with video game execs talking up DRM and the threat of piracy, a recent study of video game developers had only 10% saying that piracy was a threat to their business. Plenty were concerned about it as an issue they had to deal with, but most seemed to have some perspective on the relative risk of the threat. In fact, other parts of the survey note that about 50% are adapting to the marketplace, saying that "piracy" will change the way they do business, with it mostly meaning more "piracy-proof" business models. On the DRM front, there isn't a whole lot of interest. 50% called it irrelevant with another 20% describing DRM as a part of the problem. I have to admit I'm a bit surprised by the findings (which makes me wonder a bit about the methodology), but it's nice to see at least some suggestion that developers are adapting, rather than threatening and blaming.

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Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times reports that two World War II Japanese submarines, including one meant to carry aircraft for attacks on American cities, have been found in deep water off Hawaii where they were sunk in 1946. Specifically designed for a stealth attack on the US East Coast — perhaps targeting Washington, DC and New York City — the 'samurai subs' were fast, far-ranging, and some carried folding-wing aircraft. Five Japanese submarines were captured by American forces at the end of the war and taken to Pearl Harbor for study, then towed to sea and torpedoed, probably to avoid having to share any of their technology with the Russian military. One of the Japanese craft, the I-201, was covered with a rubberized coating on the hull, an innovation intended to make it less apparent to sonar or radar; it was capable of speeds of about 20 knots while submerged, making it among the fastest diesel submarines ever made. The other, the I-14, much larger and slower, was designed to carry two small planes, Aichi M6A Seirans that could be brought onto the deck and launched by a catapult. The submarines were meant to threaten the United States directly, but none of the attacks occurred because the subs were developed too late in the war, and American intelligence was too good. 'It's very moving to see objects like this underwater,' says Hans Van Tilburg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 'because it's a very peaceful environment, but these subs were designed for aggression.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've always wanted to take a train across the United States. Today, I'm going to do a big part of it, from Emeryville CA to Denver. Not sure where I'll go from there, playing it by ear.

I don't know how much of the trip I'll document here on scripting.com, but you can see all the activity on protoblogger.com, including a set of pictures on Flickr. All part of a grand experiment to pioneer the next generation of creative writing tools for the web.

My tools: An Asus Eee PC 1005HA, standard issue (no upgrades). I'm using my Droid, tethered, and Verizon for connectivity, but have my Sprint MiFi and iPhone with me as backups. The camera is a Canon PowerShot, but I may use the cell phones for quick pictures.

I'm on the California Zephyr, have a bedroom so I'll get a good night sleep, meals included and coffee (thanks for that).

I recently talked to Sony's Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer's respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won't: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. ... We're obligated to have DRM but we don't pull content back."

Sony's adopting the ePub open file format and encouraging DRM-insistent publishers to offer files that use a less restrictive scheme from Adobe. In doing so, Haber suggested that the worst case scenario would be 12 devices per account, effectively "books uncoupled from hardware."

Ebooks can also be digitally "loaned" free of charge for up to 21 days, from participating libraries. This works thought a deal with Overdrive, which facilitates such loans by backing them with hard copies.

Sony's new reader also features a 9" display, page-changing swipe gestures, annotations and a cellular connection to download new titles on the go. At $400, however, it's as pricey as the top-of-the-line Kindle DX that it resembles; Sony already has a new generation of cheaper e-readers out which lack the fancy features and big screen.

Barnes and Noble announced its own reader, the Nook, a few weeks ago. At $260, it's competitively priced and has a secondary LCD display. It also focuses hard on consumer-friendly features that Amazon seems unwilling to indulge: in its case, books can be shared between devices and even with friends. Not all books will be available, and shares are limited to 14 days at a time.

Without solid co-operation from publishers, Sony's adoption of ePub and B&N's sharing feature won't make much of an impact: what use are they if bestsellers aren't included? When the new devices appear and their associated stores are ramped up, we'll get to find out if the proposed changes make a difference--and whether Amazon can be reeled in.

An anonymous reader writes "What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat "We don't pirate software," and "We must have paid for it at some point." Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key, and that version of Office is on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions. As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money. Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Carrier, a law professor specializing in intellectual property law, was kind enough to let us know about a paper he recently wrote analyzing the Swedish court's ruling in The Pirate Bay Case, and seeing how the reasoning set forth might apply to two other services: Grokster and Google. Grokster, of course, was a key player in a similar US lawsuit, that eventually resulted in the service shutting down. While many believe that the Supreme Court said Grokster was illegal, in reality, the ruling on the case only found that Grokster could be liable as a third party. Grokster itself settled before the lower court could rule on the issue, though co-defendant Streamcast was eventually found liable.

Carrier's analysis suggests that the Swedish ruling over The Pirate Bay did not go into nearly enough detail on why it made its ruling. Many of the explanations are quite vague, and could be broadly applied to other services. The most interesting part of the paper looks at how Google would fare under the same conditions -- and it finds that while Google has some distinct differences from The Pirate Bay, one could read the ruling in such a way that it absolutely would apply to Google as well -- which has troubling implications. At the very least, it suggests that the Swedish court did not fully understand the technology or the implications of such a ruling, and was more influenced by the fact that it seemed like The Pirate Bay must be bad, and therefore decided to support that in the ruling. But without carefully highlighting why The Pirate Bay is different than Google, the ruling is too vague and potentially dangerous.

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DynaSoar writes "On Friday November 13th, ESA'a Rosetta probe will get its third and final gravity assist slingshot from Earth on its way to its primary targets, the asteroid Lutetia and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But the slingshot itself will allow ESA scientists to examine the trajectory for unusual changes seen in several other probes' velocities. An unaccountable variation was first noticed as excess speed in Pioneers 11 and 12, and has since been called the Pioneer Anomaly. More troubling than mere speed increase is the inconsistency of the effect. While Galileo and NEAR had appreciable speed increases, Cassini and Messenger did not. Rosetta itself gained more speed than expected from its 2005 fly-by, but only the expected amount from its 2007 fly-by. Several theories have been advanced, from mundane atmospheric drag to exotic variations on special relativity, but none are so far adequate to explain both the unexpected velocity increases and the lack of them in different instances. Armed with tracking hardware and software capable of measuring Rosetta's velocity within a few millimeters per second while it flies past at 45,000 km/hr, ESA will be gathering data which it hopes will help unravel the mystery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Incredibly moving Reading Summit presentation from the International Board on Books for Young People, who practice bibliotherapy: reading to traumatized children all over the world (war zones, disaster areas, kids who've been abused). Incredibly humane, incredibly effective. Nearly cried during the presentation.

I've just sat in on a presentation at the Canadian Reading Summit by one of the editors of OnFiction, an online scientific journal devoted to understanding the psychology of fiction reading. It was an incredibly exciting look into the neurology of fiction as an "embodied simulation." The journal looks like great reading.

cunniff writes "Wired Magazine points us to recent research that demonstrates an algorithm derived from the actual biological implementation of fly vision (PLoS paper here). Quoting the paper: 'Here we present a model with multiple levels of non-linear dynamic adaptive components based directly on the known or suspected responses of neurons within the visual motion pathway of the fly brain. By testing the model under realistic high-dynamic range conditions we show that the addition of these elements makes the motion detection model robust across a large variety of images, velocities and accelerations.' The researchers claim that 'The implementation of this new algorithm could provide a very useful and robust velocity estimator for artificial navigation systems.' Additionally, the paper describes the algorithm as extremely simple, capable of being implemented on very small and power-efficient processors. Best of all, the entire paper is public and hosted via a service that allows authenticated users to give feedback."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LEGO minifig patent from 1979! [via @grantimahara]

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The best form of exercise for maintaining healthy bones is apparently jumping up and down as many times as you can without inspiring your downstairs neighbor to come upstairs and break your bones.

Wired on what's in the FOIA'd fed wiretapping docs EFF released yesterday: "The George W. Bush administration expressed concern future administrations might not use the legal amnesty it wanted to give the nation's telecommunication companies that were being sued for assisting the president's warrantless, electronic wiretapping program."

[PHOTO: "Jessie," a CC-licensed image by LeTiger.]

A few weeks ago, I blogged a funny video created by a Canadian high-school student titled "Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101." One of the many people who commented on that post was an anonymous commenter who wrote:

Ok, my parents found out i was gay by myspace (which i regret for putting my sexual orientation) and my parents will never accept cause my parents are really realigous for our christianity. They are so realigous, that i'm now homeschooled and going to a private school. Also i have no internet unless for emergencies, no friends houses, no phone, no boy friends til i'm 18. The only times i can get out is to christian youth groups so i have no life for the next 5 years ( cause i'm 13). Oh and my parents think all the wrong things in the world about gays, they even use the gay f word. I need help and i'm typing this from my PS3 cause they don't know it has internet. HELP!!! =O

It's hard for jaded internet people like me to know when someone's pulling your leg online, but I'll take this one at face value. Many other teens read Boing Boing, and perhaps one of them is in a similar predicament. So, Dear Anonymous:

Boy, that sucks. I don't have a way of contacting you privately, so I'll say it to the world. You are fine just as you are. There is nothing wrong with being gay, and everything right with being true to yourself, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise. But being gay and a teen is very hard when your family isn't cool with it. My friend Maggie suggests that you might want to check out these helplines and Web resources, so you can talk to someone who can help you sort stuff out:

♦ amplifyyourvoice.org (a teen LGBTQ site)
♦ billwilsoncenter.org (Web chat based teen counseling service)
♦ glnh.org (National LGBTQ help center, with phone counseling lines manned by other LGBTQ people. They've got a special youth line, online peer support and access to local services and organizations.)

If you are reading this post, Anonymous, I bet some other people will be writing suggestions for other good resources in the comments. Check them out. Good luck. There are many of us in the world who welcome you just as you are. Don't believe anyone who tells you that who you are is anything less than beautiful.

Keep your head held high, little happy mutant.

Venkat Rao has followed up his analysis of office dynamics as reflected in The Office, which we discussed last month, with one titled Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk. The Office is running a little thin of meaty examples to make his points in delineating the ways of PowerTalk — the language of the Sociopaths — so Rao reaches out to Goodfellas, Wall Street, The Boiler Room, and Making Jack Falcone. The entire analysis illuminates and is illuminated by a diagram of the disparate languages that Sociopaths, the Clueless, and Losers speak to each other and among themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Look at this kick-ass anatomical ad for the International Vegetarian Union.

Vegetables are all your body needs (via Street Anatomy)

We've noted the ridiculous and self-defeating efforts by many music collections societies around the world to jack up their rates by ridiculous amounts. None was more ridiculous than the attempt in Australia by the PPCA where some of the rate changes would rocket up from figures like $125/year... to $19,344/year. Well, it looks like it's already backfiring badly. Reader Dan alerts us to the news that the organization that represents night clubs and similar businesses in Australia, appropriately named Clubs Australia, has set up a system whereby the organization will specifically go out and seek music by artists not covered by the collections effort, and distribute that music to clubs and other establishments. Then, these clubs, gyms, restaurants and the like can tell the PPCA to take a hike, and still play music. We'd already seen that some clubs had started doing this on their own, but now they've teamed up to share such music with each other in order to get out from under the PPCA entirely. So, nice job PPCA. Once again, in your effort to get people to pay more for every single use, you end up making it that much more difficult for anyone to actually hear -- or care about -- the musicians you supposedly represent.

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In 1890, a group of eminent musicians (including Peter Tchaikovsky!) got together to screw around and experiment with what was then a wacky novelty. On this early Edison Phonograph recording, the group alternately showboats, teases each other and generally pokes the new technology with a stick. This is basically the audio equivalent of how you (meaning me) used to spend entirely too much time playing with the system preference settings on the school library computer back in 1993.

Recording quality (and the fact that everybody is speaking Russian) makes it difficult to understand what's going on. Luckily, there's a translation after the cut...

This Edison phonograph cylinder recording from 1890 was made by Julius Block, a Russian Businessman of German descent (The Old Man with the Umbrella in this video) who became fascinated with the phonograph (and even convinced Tchaikovsky to sign an endorsement). The recording was re-discovered in the Pushkin archive of St.Petersburg, Russia in 1997, and was labelled with the names of the participants: Anton Rubinstein (composer), Elizaveta Lavrovskaya (singer), Peter Tchaikovsky (composer), Vassily Safonov (pianist and conductor), Alexandra Hubert (pianist), Julius Block (the host himself). One can imagine the scene - a group of eminent musicians each standing around this new 'wonderful invention', being gently encouraged to say something. So there are a few words of banter, some musical scales, whistles, etc., much of which is only just audible.

Here is the translated contents of this recording:
A. Rubinstein: What a wonderful thing [the phonograph].

J. Block: Finally.

E. Lawrowskaja: A disgusting...how he dares slyly to name me.

W. Safonov : (Sings a scale incorrectly).

P. Tchaikovsky: This trill could be better.

E. Lawrowskaja: (sings).

P. Tchaikovsky: Block is good, but Edison is even better.

E. Lawrowskaja: (sings) A-o, a-o.

W. Safonow: (In German) Peter Jurgenson in Moskau.

P. Tchaikovsky: Who just spoke? It seems to have been Safonow. (Whistles)

From Transforming Art

Psystar, the company that makes and sells Mac clones, is the subject of a piece in SF Weekly. It talked to the young brothers behind the firm and asked them why they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting Apple.

The boys loved to tinker. Robert vividly remembers his mom's fury when she came home to find the parts of a brand-new remote-control car spread across the living room floor. It had been disassembled down to the tiny plastic screws. "I've always liked understanding how things work, I guess," Robert says, smiling, "even if I couldn't put it back together again afterward."

Some people write about Psystar as if it were an offense to nature—even to the point of defending EULAs, the one-sided and adhesive contracts we "agree" to when installing software. Other nuggets in the story include Psystar's claim that their work is original and different to that of other hackers ("The first thing you have to do is unlearn everything you've read online about how to make this work, because it's all wrong.") and an unusual response from an Apple spokesperson. Worms in the Apple [SFWeekly]

A gocco print by Nate Duval that I just purchased for our kitchen. Found via the excellent Print Society.

An educational, illustrated guide. (via)

Reader whencanistop writes with some details on an upcoming EU law that slipped under the radar as it was part of the package containing the "three strikes" provision, which attracted all the attention and criticism. "A couple of weeks ago we discussed the EU cookie proposal, which has now been passed into law. While the original story broke on the Out-law blog from a law perspective ('so breathtakingly stupid that the normally law-abiding business may be tempted to bend the rules to breaking point'), there has now been followup from a couple of industry insiders. Aurelie Pols of the Web Analytics Association has blogged on how this will affect websites that want to monitor what people are looking at on their sites, while eConsultancy has blogged on how this will impact the affiliate industry. In all of this the general public is being ignored — the people who, if the law is actually implemented, will have to proceed through ridiculous screens of text every time they access a website. I know most of you guys hate cookies in general, but they are vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MrLint writes "The City of Schenectady has decided that their laws are copyrighted, and that you cannot know them without paying for an 'exclusive license' for $200. This is not a first — Oregon has claimed publishing of laws online is a copyright violation." This case is nuanced. The city has contracted with a private company to convert and encode its laws so they can be made available on the Web for free. While the company works on this project, it considers the electronic versions of the laws its property and offers a CD version, bundled with its software, for $200. The man who requested a copy of the laws plans to appeal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently I've been helping a friend's 11-year-old daughter get started in electronics. The use of a solderless breadboard was counterintuitive to her until I gave her one of these clear-cased versions, available through Solarbotics. As she puts it, "you can see where the metal is."

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We were just noting that the IFPI thinks it's going to start seizing computers directly to get evidence of unauthorized file sharing, and wondering how that would work. At least in the UK, they may have just received some legal support. Over the summer, we wondered why an anti-piracy group in the UK was given access to and allowed to keep computers from a criminal investigation into an online service, called Surfthechannel, accused of unauthorized file sharing. The police seized the computers, but decided not to pursue criminal charges. It never made much sense that private, industry-backed anti-piracy group FACT was a major part of the criminal investigation, as they're quite the biased party. They were given seized computers as a part of this investigation -- and once the police decided not to pursue criminal charges, FACT kept the machines, saying it was considering a civil suit. However, the lawyers for Surfthechannel noted that the police and FACT had no right to keep the seized machines after the decision was made not to pursue criminal charges.

Apparently (and unfortunately) a judge disagrees. Lennart Renkema alerts us (via comments on a totally separate story, rather than a submission -- not sure why) to the news that the judge in the case has said that police have every right to retain seized computers, even after they've decided not to pursue criminal charges. The judges noted that the law allows police the retain anything seized "so long as is necessary in all the circumstances" and then ruled that the potential of a civil suit from FACT was one of those "circumstances" that qualified. It's difficult to see how that makes any sense, but so ruled the court.

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astroengine writes "Physicists are getting excited about the possibility of micro-black holes (MBH) being produced by the LHC and an international group of researchers have done the math to see what kind of impact they could have on the Earth. Unfortunately, if you're a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon, you can scrub MBHs off your WMD list. If a speedy MBH is produced, flying through our planet, it will only have a few seconds to accrete the mass of a few atoms. It would then be lost to space where it will evaporate. If a slow MBH is produced, dropping into the Earth where it sits for a few billion years, the results are even more boring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever have a screw loose? If so, you might need this easy to build attachment to help you find that screw -- including plastic ones that a magnet would miss.
Thanks go to Frank Ford for the original article in MAKE, Volume 13.
To download The Lost Screw Finder video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Lost Screw Finder article in MAKE, Volume 13 and you
can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Ever have a screw loose? If so, you might need this easy to build attachment to help you find that screw -- including plastic ones that a magnet would miss.
Thanks go to Frank Ford for the original article in MAKE, Volume 13.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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If you own an older Android phone and were curious about Google Maps Navigation, but were afraid to ask, here's instructions to get it running. [via AndroidCentral]

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The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

The Times Labs blog takes a hard look at the data on music sales and live performances and concludes that while the labels' profits might be falling, artists are taking in more money, thanks to the booming growth of live shows. The Times says that they'd like more granular data about who's making all the money from concerts -- is there a category of act that's a real winner here? -- but the trend seems clear. The 21st century music scene is the best world ever for some musicians and music-industry businesses, and the worst for others. Which raises the question: is it really copyright law's job to make sure that last years winners keep on winning? Or is it enough to ensure that there will always be winners?

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

(It's often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called 'heritage acts'. Unfortunately, the data doesn't shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)..

It's interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much 'the music industry' has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.

The graph the record industry doesn't want you to see (via We Make Money Not Art)

When a block of IP addresses or a collection of domain names becomes associated with bad action -- spamming, jabbering, denial-of-servicing -- various ad-hoc Internet groups will add it to a blacklist of "rogue IPs" or "badware domains" that are blocked at a very low level in the network.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any way to readily diffuse an "all clear" signal to everyone who follows along with this block, which means that gradually, the net is acquiring "slums" -- blocks of useful space that can't be occupied by legitimate users because someone bad once lived there and now no one will accept their traffic.

The Washington Post's Security Fix visits this question -- it's a compelling problem when you think of it. Bad actors will continue to move from blocked IPs to fresh ones, and if we never release the blocked sections, eventually we'll have shut down a very large chunk of IP space indeed.

"The problem is once an address block gets so polluted and absorbed into all these blocklists, it's difficult to get off all of them because there is no central blocking authority," said Paul Ferguson, an advanced threat researcher at Trend Micro. "That space won't be toxic for all time to come, but certainly it is going to be tainted for whoever ends up with it..."

"What you'll find is some blacklists out there are derivatives of other lists, and it's hard to get those cleaned up," Bertier said, recalling a case last year in which a customer was given a swath of Internet addresses, only to find it was impossible to send e-mail from that space. "Typically in those cases, we'll work with the customers to get them new space and mark that allocation as something that really shouldn't be used for e-mail."

A year later: A look back at McColo (via /.)

Missed this one when it first came out, but Copycense points us to the news that TV broadcasters have sued SESAC, one of the collections agencies for songwriters and composers (the smallest, after ASCAP and BMI), claiming that SESAC is violating antitrust laws in how it prices music used in television shows -- especially for syndicated shows. The details are really quite fascinating. Local stations quite often run syndicated shows (such as sitcom reruns). When they buy the rights to run those syndicated shows, the package includes all of the related copyrights except for performance rights for any of the music included. Those have to be purchased separately by the broadcasters themselves. Now, for SESAC, representing the songwriters, this presents a golden opportunity. It's the only thing standing between the broadcaster and being able to show the syndicated shows -- and thus, it can ask for extremely high prices, or -- more commonly -- pressure the broadcasters into a high-priced "blanket license." Since the broadcasters can't change out the music (it's in the shows already), they generally have no choice but to go along. So, the argument goes, SESAC effectively has a monopoly position, and is abusing it.

Of course, the real "monopoly" here is copyright. At a quick glance, it certainly looks like SESAC is doing exactly what copyright allows -- but the structure of licensing for syndicated TV content allows SESAC to make life difficult for the broadcasters. So, I'm not really sure SESAC should really be faulted here, as it seems to be doing exactly what it was enabled to do thanks to overly broad copyright laws. At the same time, it also makes you wonder why the broadcasters don't go back to the TV program owners themselves and demand that they bundle the music performance rights as well, since there's more negotiating power there. So, while it does seem unfair for the broadcasters as the market is currently structured, I'm not sure it's an antitrust violation on SESAC's part. More a problem with how the industry licenses are set up, combined with copyright being way too broad in such situations.

There's also a separate interesting element to this lawsuit -- which is why it's SESAC being sued rather than ASCAP and BMI. ASCAP and BMI are both already limited due to previous antitrust fights and consent decrees against them, whereas SESAC has been more or less free to act this way. Either way, it's yet another lawsuit concerning aggressive use of copyright to try to demand as much money as possible, even for music that is a small part of an overall presentation of content.

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Panasonic has introduced the DMW-TA1 tripod adaptor for its Lumix DMC-GF1 Micro Four Thirds camera. The design of the adaptor makes it easier to use tripods when large-diameter lenses such as Lumix G Vario 45-200mm or the HD 14-140mm are attached to the camera.

AC writes "Got $2 million in assets? Then you can join BillionaireXchange; just the place to find a 2006 Bugatti Veyron with a Start Bid of $1,050,000.00. Or perhaps you are looking for a boat like the Disco Volante (from James Bond), for example the 2000 Azimut Motor Yacht, a lovely 85-footer with a Start Bid of $2,700,000.00. On the other end of the deal, did your hedge fund leave you in the lurch? This is the place to sell those extravagant toys you thought you could afford."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has released a 'White Paper' of its recently released EOS-1D Mark IV pro DSLR containing in-depth details of the camera features. It additionally covers comparison to predecessors and an overview of compatible software and accessories. All Canon white papers, including the one for EOS-1D Mark IV, are available for free download from their website.

Kevin Donovan points us to a short but interesting essay by Steven Pinker, on technological progress. In it, he discusses the popularity of moral panics over new technologies, and claims by folks who say that Google/text messaging/the web/email/etc are "making us stupid." He suggests a rather simple test for determining how silly those are, which includes seeing whether or not you'd exchange what you have today for what you had in the past:

I would suggest another way to look at the effects of technology on our collective intelligence. Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you've been doing things. From now on, you won't be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you'll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

The reason technology progresses the way it does is because it is progress. Otherwise, people wouldn't be using it. We use Wikipedia because it has many features that make it more useful. We use email/Twitter/text messaging/mp3s and other technologies for the same reason. They make life better in some way. Otherwise, they wouldn't get used at all.

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Peggy 2 is an updated version of the original Peggy light-emitting pegboard display. Version 2 adds simple animation capability and Arduino compatibility. Like its predecessor, the open-source Peggy 2 provides a quick and efficient way to drive up to 625 LEDs.

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spongman writes "Microsoft's Senior Vice President, Developer Division, S. Somasegar has announced that Microsoft has acquired Teamprise from Sourcegear, LLC, and will be shipping it as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release. Teamprise is an Eclipse plugin (and related tools) for connecting to Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's source-control/project-management system. What's most interesting about this is not only that Microsoft has realized that heterogeneous development platforms are important to their developer customers, but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

Charles P. Peirce's bestseller IDIOT AMERICA: HOW STUPIDITY BECAME A VIRTUE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE includes a wonderful portrait of Ignatius L. Donnelly (1831-1901), the lawyer, US Congressman, founder of a failed Utopian city, and bestselling author of three influential books: ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD (1882), which sparked the Atlantis mania that continues to this day, RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL (1883), which anticipated Immanuel Velikovsky's WORLDS IN COLLISION (1950) by more than half a century by attributing a world-wide deluge that sank Atlantis and wiped out the world's Mammoths to a near-collision with a comet (TRIVIA QUIZ: Can you guess what other pseudo-scientific classic was published in 1950? ANSWER: L. Ron Hubbard's DIANETICS), and then in 1889, THE GREAT CRYPTOGRAM, which argued that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and scattered clues to his authorship throughout them. Pierce considers the wildly creative, fiercely productive, and swiftly-forgotten Donnelley to be one of America's great cranks. "Cranks are noble," Peirce says, "because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out." It's like the difference between kitsch and dreck--people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better--they're in it for the money and the power and the fame.

Writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES, I learned about a lot of truly terrible people with really disturbing ideas (Charles Manson, the white supremacist David Lane, Canada's Roch "Moses" Thériault spring to mind); I also encountered some monsters who preached only good things (Jim Jones, Bhagwan Rajneesh). But the people who made the deepest impressions on me and stayed with me the longest were the Cranks. Koreshanity, the religio-political-pseudoscientific cult founded by Dr. Cyrus Read Teed (1839-1908), who believed that we don't live on the exterior of our planet but within it, on its "inner habitable surface of land and water," led me to a whole nineteenth century literature on hollow earth theory. Because Google digitized books in the public domain first, I was able to find some really rare volumes without even leaving my desk, such as William E. Lyon's THE HOLLOW GLOBE, OR, THE WORLD'S AGITATOR AND RECONCILER (1873), a portmanteau of science, mediumship, and Manifest Destiny, which looks forward to our colonization of the planet's inner frontier. I spent some time with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel VRIL: THE POWER OF THE COMING RACE (1871) too. Theosophists wrote about Vril--a mysterious form of energy--as though it were real, as did members of Thule, a German occult racialist society. In 1960 Louis Pawels and Jacques Bergier wrote a book called LE MATIN DES MAGICIENS that claimed that something called the Vril Society was Thule's inner circle; in the 1970s, a holocaust denier named Ernst Zundel, who sold an English translation of the book through his publishing house, announced an expedition to Antarctica to search for Nazi-built Vril-powered UFO bases (it never got off the ground). Zundel is currently serving a prison sentence in Germany for inciting racial hatred.

The oddest thing I encountered has no wider significance whatsoever. It's just really, really... strange. Not uncanny or eerie, it wouldn't belong in a book like IMPOSSIBLE: YET IT HAPPENED, it's more like running into an old friend in an utterly unexpected place. It happened when I was researching The Processeans.

I first came across the Processeans when I was writing about Charles Manson--they had sued the publisher of Ed Sanders' THE FAMILY, which claimed that their involvement with Manson went deeper than the interview they did with him for the "Death" issue of their magazine The Process. The publisher recalled the book and every reference to the "black-garbed, death-worshipping Processeans," as Sanders had called them, was removed from its pages. In 1987, a book called THE ULTIMATE EVIL accused the Processeans of involvement in the Son of Sam murders. Long after I turned in my manuscript to Vintage, in June, 2009, Feral House published Timothy Wyllie's LOVE SEX FEAR DEATH: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PROCESS CHURCH OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT. I wish I had had access to it when I was writing my book, but I had to scrounge around for whatever I could find. Someone had scanned whole issues of the Process magazine onto his Web site, along with memoirs by ex members and a whole book by one of Process's founders. An obituary for another founder led me to an article in the Rocky Mountain News, which is now posted on Rick Ross's cult website. But more on that in a moment.

First, who were the Processeans? Some Boing Boing readers might remember them or have even had personal experiences with them; I'm too young and led too sheltered a life. Process began in London in the early 1960s as an Adlerian psychoanalytic practice. It was led by two ex-Scientologists, an ex-cavalry officer named Robert Moor (who changed his name to Robert de Grimston) and a former call girl named Mary Anne MacLean. By 1966, their practice had transmogrified into a religion (Alistair Cooke's daughter and stepdaughter were members). With a follower's inheritance, they purchased a mansion in Mayfair and began to publish their magazine (the press dubbed them "The Mind Benders of Mayfair"). Mick Jagger appeared on one of the magazine's early covers; De Grimston published a chapbook whose first and last lines gave the group its catchphrase: "As it is, so be it." In 1966 they decamped to the Yucatan, where they witnessed the destruction of Hurricane Inez. De Grimston's thinking took on an apocalyptic tinge: "The power of Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan is the dominant power," he wrote. "Conflicted though they may be for the purpose of the Game, upon one matter They are in total agreement....and that matter is the fact of the End. The End of the world as we know it; the end of humankind as we know it." Processean Churches sprung up around the country; their services featured sitars and invocations of Christ, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Satan.

In the mid-1970s, De Grimston and MacLean (the Omega, they called themselves) divorced and the group collapsed. But it didn't die. Instead it changed. First into another religion, The Foundation Faith of the Millennium. And then into something else altogether. As that article in the February 28, 2004 Rocky Mountain News reported:

One of the world's most admired animal sanctuaries has a skeleton tucked deep in its closet - one with a history worthy of its own miniseries. The Best Friends Animal Society runs the nation's largest "no-kill" shelter in Utah and raised $19.9 million last year alone. But more than three decades ago, its key founders formed a movement that was accused - falsely, they say - of being a satanic cult.

Michael Mountain, the president of Best Friends and an original Processean, played down the group's loucher aspects in the interview he granted, but there you have it. The Best Friends Animal Society of Angel Canyon, Utah, nationally known for its pet rescue efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, its Best Friends magazine, and the National Geographic TV show Dogtown, was originally incorporated as a doomsday cult.
From sitars and death-trips to adorable puppies and kittens, in just twenty five years. As Mark Twain said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

There have been stories here and there about Facebook statuses implicating people in a crime, but how about one that helped get someone cleared from a crime? Apparently, a guy who was accused of being involved in a burglary used the fact that he had updated his Facebook status at around the time of the crime, and had supposedly done so from his father's apartment, as evidence that he wasn't present at the burglary. The police subpoenaed Facebook to get the actual location where the update came from (and said it corroborated some additional alibis), but it seems to be one of the first (if not the first) case of a social networking status update being useful as an alibi.

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Audiofan writes "Enthusiasts have long suggested the PlayStation 3 to their family and friends as one of the better and most affordable Blu-ray players. Lately, prices of Blu-ray players have been coming down, but the PS3 is still one of the better options out there. Sony is taking advantage of this by starting to offer game demos on their Blu-ray offerings. While these demos will only be playable on the PS3, they hope the extra value will help drive sales."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips (Michelle Khine tR35 winner)... Microfluidic chips cost more than $100,000 -

Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says.

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.

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We all know the importance of Section 230 safe harbors that protect a service provider from actions done by its users. While there have been a few cases that chipped away at those protections, on the whole, they're quite solid. However, Eric Goldman brings us the story of how some lawyers seem to be dealing with this. They've stopped suing the sites directly, but they then file a lawsuit against the party who actually created the content they want taken down -- but if that person does not show up in court, then the suing party can get a default judgment, and then use that default judgment to get the content taken offline -- since the default judgment can be used to enforce injunctions against third parties. From the perspective of the suing party, then, they have every incentive in the world to try to get a default judgment, rather than even fighting with the real person in court. Then, with the default judgment, they can force a site to take down the content. As Goldman notes:

For the price of a complaint and a defendant's default (which can be engineered by targeting a phantom author), plaintiffs obtain an effective cudgel to excise unwanted content throughout the web.

That's not a good thing.

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Rick sez, "SFFaudio has just announced their 4th Annual Make an Audiobook, Get an Audiobook Challenge. They have twenty Science Fiction and Fantasy titles of public domain and Creative Commons novels that they'd like to see freely available as audiobooks on the internet. They're looking for participants to commit to recording and editing the sound files and then making them available online. At that point they will get to choose a free audiobook for a prize. But the real prize is the satisfaction of creating a creative work that can be shared with all. Previous SFFaudio Challenges have generated some great audiobooks of classic and obscure titles that would otherwise be unavailable in audio. This year's challenges has a variety of authors including Jack London, Mack Reynolds, James E. Gunn and many others."

The 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge (Thanks, Rick!)

Current TV lets go 80 employees, cancels some shows. Programming head David Neuman (former D<N exec) is out, a new CEO from MTV is in. Coverage: Variety, SF Chron + LAT. Quote: "As much as you might want to change the world, sometimes there is not that much you can change -- particularly when you are dealing with the world of television."

CNN laid off its four web video anchors today and announced that continuous live video production for CNN.com will end. Thus dies "one of the Internet's biggest news experiments." (NYT, via Andrew Baron)

Lucas123 writes "A start-up launched a new DVD archive product this week: a disc that it says will hold its data for 1,000 years. The company, Cranberry, says its DiamonDisc product, which can be used in any standard DVD player, is not subject to deterioration from heat, UV rays or material rot due to humidity or other elements because it has no dyes, adhesives or reflective materials like standard DVD discs, and its discs are made from a vastly more durable synthetic stone. Data is laid down on the platter much in the same way as a standard DVD disc, but with DiamonDisc the burner etches much deeper pits. Cranberry said it is also working on producing a Blu-ray version of its 1,000-year disc."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My husband called me last night all a-twitter and once I got him talking slow enough to understand that he wasn't going on about "six pennies", I could sympathize with the high level of enthusiasm. Earlier this year, "Sixth Sense Technology" from MIT---basically, a visual interface system that allows you and the computer in your cell phone to communicate in some truly astounding ways---was a big hit at TED. This week, at TED India, inventor Pranav Mistry announced that the technology will be released as open source...in a matter of months.

"Rather than waiting for that time to come, I want people to make their own system. Why not?," Mistry says in an article on Rediff Business. "People will be able to make their own hardware. I will give them instructions how to make it. And also provide them key software...give them basic key software layers...they will be able to build their own applications. They will be able to modify base level and do anything".

Makers, start your engines.

Mistry to make digital "Sixth Sense" open source on Rediff Business
The importance of Sixth Sense going open source on zdnet

Sixth Sense augmented reality device goes open source on Singularity Hub (natch)

More details out today on Comcast's "TV Everywhere" service launching in December. "Yes, this does still count against the 250GB monthly cap if used at home and still no word on HD streaming." Related: NYT on Comcast's $30 billion takeover bid for NBC Universal. (via Andrew Baron)

I attended a YouTube roundtable in San Francisco yesterday, and learned of many features coming soon, including this: Starting next week, YouTube's HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p. In this blog post, see how much this enhances one's experience of a dog's snout.

Last month I posted about SoundCloud's slick music sharing site, really the best I've seen. David Noël from SoundCloud posted in the comments about one of their hacks from London Hack Day called CitySounds.fm. I've been tuning into the site a lot for a bit of the unexpected and to gain exposure to artists I may not have discovered on my own. The site pulls tracks and sets uploaded to SoundCloud in real time according to location. The homepage (The Board) looks like the screenshot above and represents the most active cities. Click on a city and hear a stream of the latest music uploaded from that location. Alternately, the popular chart represents the 32 most popular cities according to tweets put out about those cities. If you make music, you can sign up on SoundCloud for free, upload tracks, and see them appear on CitySounds.fm right away. There are also individual city pages, like this one for Chicago, which list stats and most popular genres coming out of that city. Getting bored with your music collection? Check it out.

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BullJustin points out to us that the guys behind Star Wreck (which we wrote about back in 2006) are trying a few interesting things to promote their follow-up movie project Iron Sky -- a story about Nazis who fled to the moon in 1945 with plans to return to Earth in 2018. To connect with fans, the Iron Sky project released some Creative Commons material for a movie teaser remix and is selling "War Bonds" to crowdfund part of the movie production. To be clear, the "War Bonds" aren't actually bonds -- just a limited-edition package (only 2,000) of keepsakes that includes:

• a 16-page book with very pretty pictures
• a DVD with the teaser trailer and two documentaries
• a signed certificate of support
• official dogtags
• undying gratitude

There are about 1,760 war bonds still available at 50€ a piece. Though, you can get some of the items separately from the Iron Sky online store (undying gratitude is presumably included in all purchases).

With only 240 war bonds sold since August 2008, the Iron Sky movie isn't going to be completely funded by fans. But it looks like the British Stealth Media Group has chipped in up to 1 million euros for worldwide distribution rights -- and the movie's total budget has grown to be at least 5 million euros. On top of that, the Star Wreck folks seem to have even bigger plans -- with a separate Iron Sky game project called Iron Sky: Operation Highjump that is looking for contributions/suggestions from fans to create a single-player video game based on the movie's background story. All of which is based on the WreckAMovie community that encourages more films to be bootstrapped and crowdsourced from a collection of both amateur and professional filmmakers.

So for much less than $200 million, the Star Wreck crew is developing creative ways to interact with their fans (and other filmmakers) to get their projects accomplished more cost effectively. They've given away free promotional materials for fan remixing. They've set up a process for fans to donate ideas and money to the project. They're creating movie accessories that get an audience excited about a movie that hasn't even been made yet. Shouldn't this be the way more movies are produced?

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My six-year-old told me she doesn't understand her homework. After studying it for 15 minutes, I *think* I understand what she's supposed to do, but I'd like a second opinion.

MAKE subscriber John Duksta writes in to tell us that the Quahogcon Maker Culture/Information Security conference call for papers is now open. QuahogCon is a new conference, conveniently located in Providence, RI, and proceeds will go to benefit the FabLab hackerspace. They're looking for makers to give talks about their awesome projects, and this could be a cool opportunity to share you latest invention!

Description: Come one, come all! Screw up your courage and get up to talk in front of a room full of folks at QuahogCon! We're a new conference in Providence, RI, looking to give you a place in the Northeast to present your ideas on Information Security and Maker Culture. We're here to encourage the hacker ethic in all its forms.

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Take a look at this crazy home water purification system created by a 68-year-old retired engineer.

Above: "magnetic bottle. Plastic bottle with a magnet (I used magnets for the refrigerator). Here are removed from the water surplus of some metals."

Below: "Fig.6 Capacitance cereal saturation. Funnel neck of a plastic bottle filled with millet. Here the water is saturated with vitamins and gets incomparable flavor Russian fields."

Machine for water purification

Snoop Dogg just admitted on Twitter than Willie Nelson conquered him at weed-fu. World, we have a champion.

Ah, year's end is nigh -- no, I'm not talking about turkey discounts or Christmas retail displays. Must be the season of the list! PopSci's "Best of What's New," 2009 list includes that beautiful all-glass TKTS building in Times Square, biodegradable fungus, and a telescope designed to find Earth-like planets.

"On December 27th, 1996, Apple had $1.8 billion in cash and securities. Today it has $34 billion."

Prompted by a new GQ article about Ayn Rand (The Bitch is Back with this great illo by John Ritter), our friend Richard Metzger wrote about his relationship with her writing and ideas.

Via mail order I collected single issues of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter until I had them all and I kept them in bound cases like holy relics. This is what can happen when bright kids read Ayn Rand, they get obsessed, but hopefully, like me, they will grow out of it. Discovering Lenny Bruce, Marx, Marcuse, Crowley, Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre deprogrammed my teenage ass but good and by that time I was 14 and I soon stopped caring about Ayn Rand altogether.

...

It’s Rand’s dialogue that seals her reputation as an author you just can’t take seriously. To be fair, she was writing in her second language, but the problem with her books is that no one actually speaks to one another, they just make speeches at each other. Hectoring, long-winded speeches. It’s fine to read stuff like that as a teenager, but when I crack open one of her books today, I shake my head in disbelief at how bombastic and horrible her writing is.

Ayn Rand Assholes

I love "lazyweb" sites, Q&A sites, and other crowdsourced resources that deal in instant-gratification content. I especially like them when the signal-to-noise ratio is high; when a lot of really smart, inspired people come together to share their expertise.

As of a few weeks ago, O'Reilly now has its own such site, O'Reilly Answers, a place where O'Reilly authors, editors, conference speakers and goers, readers, i.e. the O'Reilly community, can share knowledge and ideas. Some have asked: how is this any different from StackOverflow? StackOverflow is about programming. O'Reilly Answers is about anything its community of users wants it to be about. The site's tagline is: "Clever Hacks. Creative Ideas. Innovative Solutions." If that's what it turns out to be about, it'll definitely be a place where you'll want to hang.

O'Reilly Answers

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