An anonymous reader writes "A week ago, 60 Minutes had a story (we picked it up too) claiming that hackers had caused power outages in Brazil. While this assertion is now believed to be in error, hackers were inspired by the story actually to do what was claimed. Last Thursday, they broke into ONS, the operator of the grid (Google translation; Portuguese original). DarkReading has specific details on the SQL injection vulnerabilities the hackers probably used."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "A week ago, 60 Minutes had a story (we picked it up too) claiming that hackers had caused power outages in Brazil. While this assertion is now believed to be in error, hackers were inspired by the story actually to do what was claimed. Last Thursday, they broke into ONS, the operator of the grid (Google translation; Portuguese original). DarkReading has specific details on the SQL injection vulnerabilities the hackers probably used."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now why didn't we think of this?

Bill Gurstelle writes:

It is exactly what it sounds like. This year several cars, trucks, and two school buses were launched. I'm absolutely going to be there next year.

Car Launching

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angry tapir writes "A Beijing court has ruled that Microsoft violated a Chinese company's intellectual property rights in a case over fonts used in past Windows operating systems. The Beijing Number One Intermediate People's Court ordered Microsoft to stop selling versions of Windows that use the Chinese fonts, including Windows XP. Microsoft plans to appeal the case. Microsoft originally licensed Zhongyi's intellectual property more than a decade ago for use in the Chinese version of Windows 95, according to Zhongyi. Zhongyi argues that agreement applied only to Windows 95, but that Microsoft continued to use the intellectual property in eight versions of Windows from Windows 98 to Windows XP. Vista and Windows 7 are not involved."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here in the US, there's an important legal battle going on over whether or not you can patent genes. Not surprisingly, we're very much against such a system, which gives a total monopoly to certain companies on doing certain types of genetic testing. It also makes no sense at all, as patents are supposed to be about promoting invention -- not finding something in nature that others can also find. Down in Australia, however, there's a similar debate going on, but in the legislative branch, rather than the judicial. Reader sinsi alerts us to the news of a recent panel discussion in Australia where a bunch of patent attorneys predicted the virtual collapse of the biotech industry in Australia if firms weren't able to patent genes.

This is, of course, ridiculous. First of all, much of the research on these things is often done via government and university funding -- and it's often done for reasons other than locking up a monopoly on the technique. Reasons such as helping people live better lives (*gasp* -- what a concept!). Or, more to the point, it's done so that firms can sell an actual product. If they have to compete in the marketplace, that's a good thing, as it pushes them to be more efficient and offer a better overall service, rather than just jacking up prices. And how do they offer a better overall service? Oh yeah, often by continuing to do more research and creating new breakthroughs.

These sorts of claims of industries collapsing are moral panics and folk devils put forth by patent attorneys who are really afraid that it's going to hurt their own business. There's simply no evidence at all that it harms the overall biomedical profession if they can't patent the finding of naturally occurring genes.

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fahrbot-bot sends in a Register piece about DARPA letting the penultimate contract for what is intended to be a jet-mounted laser cannon. The Reg outdoes itself in a BOTEC involving downsizing to shark scale. "The US military will shortly issue a brace of contracts for 'refrigerator sized' laser blaster cannons. One of the deals will see a full-power ground prototype built which will be the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter. ... If it scales down far enough, this would seem to put handheld HELL-guns within an order of magnitude of the striking power offered by conventional small-arms. A 9mm pistol bullet has about 750 joules muzzle energy: a 5kg portable HELL-ray weapon would put out this much energy in a blast less than a second long. ... A dolphin can carry a human being weighing up to 100kg along for a ride. A thoroughbred shark in good training can surely match this. Thus, we seem to be looking at practicable head-[laser] output in the 20-kilowatt range."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From designer Jung Hwa Jin, the "Polaroid Flower Vase:"

...a small planter that recalls the nostalgic form of polaroid, with the plant becoming the focus of the "picture." The planter is suspended with a clothespin on the end of a cord, with a small embedded lamp illuminating its subject.

[Thanks, Ellie!]

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So this is interesting. The folks at The Pirate Bay have shut down its tracker for good, and switched entirely to a distributed, decentralized system, called DHT. As others are noting, this is quite a milestone, but I actually wonder if it will also have legal implications. Basically, using such a distributed system takes The Pirate Bay even further out of the equation in terms of its role in the sharing of content, and in theory could impact the ruling against The Pirate Bay. Of course, the entertainment industry will say it doesn't matter, and the courts (who don't seem to understand these things very well) might not realize the difference, but it is meaningful in terms of how involved The Pirate Bay actually is in the activity that's happening.

But, of course, even if this makes no difference in how the courts view The Pirate Bay (as expected), it does show the inevitable trend of these things: making them ever more and more decentralized and harder to shut down. When the RIAA shut down Napster, what came out of it was even more decentralized and harder to stop. Now the same thing is happening with the attempted shut down of The Pirate Bay. Even if you don't like what sites like The Pirate Bay do, at some point you have to wonder what good it does to keep shutting down these offerings when all it does is drive people to the "next" offering that's even more difficult to stop? At some point, someone is going to get the message that you can't stop this stuff. So why not figure out a way to use it to your advantage?

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"Father" from the series "Spin Family (Bosons and Fermions)" 2009, steel and silk, 7" x 6" x 6".

We've posted previously about physicist, software designer, and artist Julian Voss-Andreae whose work lies at the intersection of science and sculpture. Last year, he created a massive metal protein sculpture linked to Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. Now, Julian has made 30 objects inspired by his former physics research area of quantum physics. The objects are currently on display at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland. More images and background on the work after the jump.

From Voss-Andreae's artist statement:

The term "Quantum Object", although regularly used in physics, is really an oxymoron. An 'object' is something that lives completely in the paradigm of classical physics: It has an independent reality in itself, it behaves deterministically, and it has definite physical properties, such as occupying a well-defined spot in time and space. For the 'quantum' all those seemingly self-evident truths become false: Its reality is one that is relative to the observer, the principle of causality is violated, and other features of materiality such as clear boundaries in space and time, objective locatedness or even identity, do not pertain.

Above: "Prayer (Head sketch for Quantum Woman 2)", 2009, masonite, paper, and steel hardware
14" x 11" x 10" ; Below: "Night Path" (detail), 2009, painted steel and gold thread, 18" x 19" x 6"

More from Voss-Andreae:

After struggling with quantum physics for the last hundred years we cannot escape the fact that there simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics, because our brains are exquisitely adapted to making sense of the world on our scale, as perceived through our unaided senses. My hope is that the unique ability of art to transcend the confines of logic and literal representation and to offer glimpses of something beyond can help us open up to a deeper understanding of the world and to wean ourselves from the powerful grip classical physics has had over the last centuries on our every perception of reality.

Quantum Objects

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA is launching a new mainstream graphics card today, aimed at consumers in the market for a relatively low-cost upgrade from an integrated graphics solution or older entry-level GPU. The new GeForce GT 240, features a GPU with 96 processor cores, 8 ROP units, and 32 texture filtering units. The GPU is manufactured using a 40nm process, features a GDDR5 memory controller (that's also compatible with GDDR3), and unlike NVIDIA's current high-end GPUs, the GT 240 is DirectX 10.1 compatible. For $100 or less, what's perhaps most interesting is that this graphics card actually puts up respectable frame rates with AA turned on and no external power needed beyond what a standard PCIe slot provides."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo: Mag3737

Michael Fricklas, Viacom's General Counsel, gave a lecture to a Yale Law class in which he confessed that suing people for copyright infringement felt "like terrorism." He says that this was bad strategy on the entertainment industry's part, as was "bad" DRM.

That's the good part -- an admission that suing customers is bad news. But lest you think that Fricklas has learned anything from this experience, consider the rest of his talk.

First, like a lot of people who got bitten on the ass by the magic DRM beans he bought a decade ago, he's unable to resolve his cognitive dissonance around DRM. The problem isn't DRM, he reasons, the problem is that he used the wrong DRM. He argues that there are "business models" that are enabled by DRM, and you just need to get it right.

I hear this all the time. It's truly the mark of a magic-bean-buyer: someone who has failed to absorb the first principle of DRM, namely, "DRM is technically impossible." There is no way that you can send someone a scrambled message, and the key to descramble the message, and then build a business on the foundational principle that no one will descramble the message except on the terms that you set.

And what's more, the effort to preserve DRM involves laws that prohibit telling people about flaws in DRM (which doesn't mean that the flaws won't be discovered and shared and used to undermine DRM, of course -- just because you cover your eyes, it doesn't follow that the danger goes away). It involves laws that prohibit making products compatible with DRM without permission from the DRM maker, even if you're doing something otherwise legal (so your customers can't buy someone else's music player, which means that you're locked into that vendor who can dictate terms to you forever).

This often gets lost in the DRM discussion: we get bogged down in what the DRM "allows" and "prohibits" and forget that DRM doesn't actually stop pirates from doing anydamnthing they want to do. And since most infringing users will "crack" the DRM by finding a copy that someone else took the DRM off of and uploaded, it doesn't deter "casual" pirates either.

But if you've been buying magic beans for ten years, it's hard to stop believing in magic beans -- certainly harder than believing that you've just been buying the wrong beans.

And Fricklas's wrongness doesn't end there. He also believes in a "three strikes" approach to copyright enforcement, because it is "more proportional to the harm." That is to say, he thinks that cutting an entire household off from the Internet (which supplies livelihood, civic engagement, publication, communications, education, and family) because one member stands accused (without conviction) of copyright infringement is less bad than merely bullying the family's teenager out of ten or fifteen thousand dollars.

This really is the most telling part of the whole speech: to believe that issuing the digital death penalty for entire families' information lives will somehow be less of a PR disaster than suing kids. It is the mark of a man who is so monumentally out of touch with reality that it's easy to understand how he rose to a level of prominence and power in an industry that made history by suing 30,000 of its customers.

Viacom's top lawyer: suing P2P users "felt like terrorism"

(Thanks, Marilyn!)

Like many of us, Nyle Steiner has long aspired to building a homemade transistor. While considering possible way to achieve this, he stumbled upon the interesting idea of building a FET transistor from a cadmium sulfide photocell.

Normally used to detect light, the photocell is pretty close to what one would need to make a transistor. The device consists of two pieces of metal that are separated by a very thin layer of a cadmium sulfide semiconductor. The semiconductor is normally an insulator, which means that no electricity can flow from one of the metal legs to the other. However, when light (photons) hit the surface of the semiconductor, they knock electrons free, and allow some current to flow across the semiconductor. To make a transistor, though, the device needs to react to electricity, not light. Nyle realized that the photocell could be used as a transistor if an insulated gate was added to the top of it. A bit of scotch tape and water later, and he claims to have a working transistor.

Of course, this isn't a truly homemade transistor, it's more of a DIY transistor conversion. The device appears to be functional, however it requires fairly high voltages to work, and only acts as a power amplifier instead of a voltage amplifier. Even so, it looks like an interesting way to experiment with transistors at home. I'd like to build one, and vary thickness of the insulator (scotch tape) to see what the results are. Anyone else have experience with this?

Related:

• Adafruit's CdS tutorial
• MAKE presents: The Transistor
• The lost transistor

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When I found out that a graphic novel about the life of Bertrand Russell was in the works, I imagined it would be interesting, but I never thought it would be as spellbinding as it turned out to be. Logicomix, created by a team of Greek artists and writers is full color graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and his ardent quest for the logical foundation of mathematics. The creators of the graphic novel put themselves into the story, between chapters of Russell's life, to discuss their thoughts on key moments. It's a clever and useful way to add additional context to the story.

The book is 352 pages long -- 10 pages less than what it took Russell and Whitehead to prove that 1+1 = 2 in their book Principia Mathematica, but I was tearing through it to find out what happened. Afterwards, I went back to admire the artwork, which is masterfully composed and filled with terrific architecture and other detials. All-in-all, this was a surprisingly terrific book.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

eldavojohn writes "2009 has been an interesting year for NASA — from a new strategy to even closer ties with an old enemy. So it's perhaps no surprise that NASA has publicly stated that they are ready to team up with China. NASA Chief Charles Bolden said, 'I am perfectly willing, if that's the direction that comes to me, to engage the Chinese in trying to make them a partner in any space endeavor. I think they're a very capable nation. They have demonstrated their capability to do something that only two other nations that have done — that is, to put humans in space. And I think that is an achievement you cannot ignore. They are a nation that is trying to really lead. If we could cooperate we would probably be better off than if we would not.' While the budget of the China National Space Administration is a fraction of NASA's, partnering with them has been considered since 2008. In possibly related news, rumors are circulating of the Obama administration cutting NASA's budget by ten percent for fiscal year 2011 despite the success of Monday's Atlantis launch. Considering the Augustine panel's recommendations, such a cut could halt US human space flight for a decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

crcb alerts us to the bizarre situation where the son (and heir to the copyrights) of poet Louis Zukofsky isn't just brandishing the copyrights against those trying to republish his works, but he seems to be demanding fees from anyone quoting his father or writing about him -- even academic dissertations. It doesn't appear as if Paul is doing this to protect a legacy or anything (if anything, it sounds like he's not a fan of his father), but he does want cold hard cash:

"I hardly give a damn what is said about my father (I am far more protective of my mother) as long as the name is spelled properly, and the fees are paid."

The full copyright notice is quite a doozy, where the son basically seems to think copyright law means he alone gets to determine what is acceptable and what is not -- and, for the most part, his view is that he doesn't want you ever quoting or discussing his father, but if you must, then he wants money. He also seems to think that fair use is as he defines it, rather than what the law actually says.

All Louis and Celia Zukofsky is still copyright, and will remain so for many many years. I own all of these copyrights, and they are my property, and I insist upon deriving income from that property. For those of you convinced that LZ would find my stance abhorrent, the truth is that he kept all copyrights (initially in his name) as he had the rather absurd idea that said copyrights would be sufficient to allow for the economic survival of my mother, and their son. My stance is congruent with that hope.

Despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ's words as you see fit, as if you owned them, while you hide behind the rubric of "fair use". "Fair use" is a very-broadly defined doctrine, of which I take a very narrow interpretation, and I expect my views to be respected. We can therefore either more or less amicably work out the fees that I demand; you can remove all quotation; or we can turn the matter over to lawyers, this last solution being the worst of the three, but one which I will use if I need to enforce my rights.

Except that, no, fair use is somewhat broadly defined under the law, and just because Paul wants it narrowly defined, it does not follow that this is the case. As Paul's father, Louis Zukofsky once wrote: "The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems." Apparently, Paul would like to make that a lot more difficult and a lot more expensive. And, yes, Paul, quoting that was fair use.

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Today and Tomorrow has some photos and a video of a cool robotic sculpture from the late 1960s, designed by Edward Ihnatowicz. Senster would be right at home at Maker Faire!

The Senster was a robotic sculpture developed by Edward Ihnatowicz in the late 60's. It was commisioned by Philips and part of their permanent showplace, the Evoluon, in Eindhoven between 1970 and 1974. It was the first robotic sculpture to be controlled by a computer and could react to the behaviour of the visitors with its sound and movement sensors. The computer used to control The Senster was a Philips P9201 and had only 8K of core memory. Now, almost 40 years later, every interaction student could make something like this and fit the logic in a small box. But this is still an amazing project.

The Senster (Via Mt. Holly Mayor's Office)

theodp writes "Over at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Michael Mazerov carefully picks apart Amazon's arguments against collecting sales taxes, arguing that they simply do not withstand scrutiny. While Amazon officials say collecting sales tax in every state would be excessively burdensome, Mazerov notes the e-tailer already collects sales tax in virtually every state for numerous other companies that sell on its website. Mazerov also finds it disingenuous for Amazon to argue that it should not have to help support public services in states in which it has no physical presence when the company fails to support public services in most of the states in which it does have a physical presence. Finally, Mazerov isn't buying Amazon's argument that its opposition to collecting sales tax is not driven by a desire to gain a price advantage over competitors, which he finds at odds with the company's own actions and SEC filings. By claiming sales-tax immunity, says Mazerov, Amazon has enjoyed an unfair 5%-10% price advantage over local retailers, while also depriving states and localities of hundreds of millions of dollars of legally due revenue each year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an infographic from Slosh Spot that shows how popular pot is, how many people are arrested for possessing it, how much tax revenue it could generate if it were legal, and how much is spent fighting drug use.

If Marijuana Production Were Legal: Projected Tax Revenues, by State (Via Dosenation)

An "Age of cyber warfare is dawning," according to a report. But a report by whom? A company selling computer security software, of course!

I'm very happy to introduce our new guest blogger, Saul Griffith. He's a friend and a long time contributor to MAKE, where his Making Trouble column and Howtoons comics are reader favorites. A visit to Saul's workshop is a mind-boggling treat -- home-made bikes, giant kites, modded dune buggies, cheap eyeglass making machines, hand-held human-powered generators, and other wondrous prototype devices are all over the place. He comes closer to being a real-life Professor from Gilligan's Island than anyone I know. Saul was named a McArthur Fellow in 2007.

I'm looking forward to what Saul writes for Boing Boing over the next two weeks. I promise it will be very interesting. -- Mark

I'm guest blogging at Boing Boing! I'm excited, not only because I've long been a fan, but also because you, as readers here, are out there at the edge thinking about the future and how to build it and participate in it.

I'm failing at finishing a book (with my colleague Jim McBride who will hopefully join me in the postings) that we've been writing on climate and energy issues for what seems like forever.  As we are approaching the Copenhagen UN Climate Change conference (http://en.cop15.dk/) on December 7th, I thought I may as well summarize the contents of my book in a 12(ish)-part series here at Boing Boing.  Sadly it already appears the world has given up hope on reaching any sort of agreement on targets at Copenhagen, which is unfortunate, but lucky for me, because the entire book is about how you might choose such a target, and how you would plan appropriate responses, personally, locally, nationally, and globally. It also will help you call bull$#!+ on people at dinner parties who espouse some fantastic new perpetual motion machine.

If you want to just read it in a book you can wait for us to get our act together, squint at pieces at www.energyliteracy.com, or simply read David J.C. MacKay's wonderful "Sustainability without the hot air" instead, as he is more highly functional than myself, and already got his book covering similar material for the UK out there and published.

Before the climate change deniers and skeptics run to their keyboards to write long-winded diatribes in the comments section, I'll try to ward you off by saying that you can just consider the posts as a thought experiment.  "If this climate stuff were actually true in some parallel universe, what could we do to address the problem, and what might the resultant world look like?"

Naturally a lot of that is going to be pretty serious stuff with lots of graphs and charts. I'll do my best to make the graphs and charts pretty (thanks to Kirk Von Rohr), but as that's not enough to compensate for the seriousness of the matter, I'll also be posting about the things I'm working on at otherlab.com, passionate about, or random things that are interesting to me right now. A lot of that will be energy generation technology stuff, bicycles, programmable matter and computational geometry, origami, cool ways to make things, and science education.

I'm an enormous fan of the engineering methodology of figuring out your goal or target, then working backwards from there to figure out what you have to do to achieve that goal. That's the basic structure of the argument. I'm also a big believer in energy literacy and having more people really understanding what's up and what the options are. So briefly, here's an outline (and i reserve the right to change my mind about the order in coming days) of the Energy Literacy series here at Boing Boing. Hopefully it will give you a much deeper understanding of what's behind the scenes and headlines of the Copenhagen conference, and just how far the public conversation about energy is from the public's concept of climate targets.

1. Energy, Power, Carbon, population. (entropy, exergy, the whole 9 yards). A primer on all of the key definitions and buzzwords and players with an emphasis on giving an intuitive understanding of the problem to non number nerds.

2. Personal Energy Use. (or How to obsessively compulsively measure the level of your own energy use)
a. Flying.
b. Driving.
c. Heating & Cooling.
d. Eating.
e. Stuff.
f. Society. (your tax dollars at work).

3. Global Energy Use demographics. (Or how to put your lifestyle into the larger global context, this is a global challenge after all)
US, current, historical.
Global, current, historical.
Breakdown per capita and by nation.

4. The need for a global climate target.
a. how might you choose that target?
b. climate models. scenarios. impact studies.
c. why +2 degrees celsius seems to be the target.
d. two ways of looking at climate. % reductions. total carbon left to burn.

5. Where can you get the power (energy) from that is not carbon based?
a. global energy balance.
b. solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, nuclear, etc.
c. power density of the different options in terms of land. The nation of Renewistan.
d. how much industrial effort would that actually take?

6. By now you should have an idea of how challenging this energy supply game is, and why, perhaps, it's unlikely that we should imagine an infinite energy future. How do you live "conscious" of this. What is a lifestyle that "adds up?" My New lifestyle: Living knowing what I know now. (Or how can i figure out how to live the way I'd like everyone to live)
Flying.
Driving.
Heating / cooling.
Eating.
Stuff. (Heirloom products)
Society. (A hair-brained argument for not paying your taxes)

7. Other ideas, Crazy ideas, Why efficiency is rarely what people call it, Get out of jail free cards and other optimistic hype.

8. Climate change can be seen as an aesthetic issue. We are designing the world we live in. How do we do that well? What could it look like?

Oh yeah, there'll be data too. I love data.

And because we all love images I can't resist posting this drawing by the son of a friend of a friend's father, Marco Ahluwalia, who I think is 9 and lives in Jakarta (so much for fact checking). We'll need inventors like him, and the optimism and spirit inherent in his master plan.

Bio: Saul Griffith is an inventor and entrepreneur. He did his PhD at MIT in programmable matter, exploring the relationship between bits and atoms, or information and materials. Since leaving MIT, he has co-founded a number of technology companies including www.optiopia.com, www.squid-labs.com, www.instructables.com, www.potenco.com, and www.makanipower.com. For the past 3-4 years he has focussed all of his efforts on energy issues relating to climate change, including working on high-altitude wind power at Makani Power, and starting www.wattzon.com, a website for understanding and quantifying personal energy use. Most recently, he has formed www.Otherlab.com with Jack Bachrach and Jim McBride to focus on energy solutions, working on new generation technologies, and the design and engineering of low-energy solutions to life's high-energy consumption products and services. For sanity, and to satisfy his passion for education in science, he works on www.howtoons.com with Nick and Ingrid Dragotta. Howtoons are comics with hands-on science and engineering projects embedded in illustrated adventures. Saul spends a portion of his time as an EIR at www.foundationcapital.com learning about the venture capital business and advising on their clean-tech portfolio. Saul blogs when prodded at www.energyliteracy.com.

Limor Fried and I spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 today... Here's a description of our talk and our slides!

Open source hardware is a term slowly working its way into many new projects and efforts, but what is it? There are a few definitions, some of which come from “open source software,” which is usually considered software’s “source code under a license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.” So how does this translate to hardware? This session will focus on electronic hardware, the layers they can be divided into, different document types, licensing concerns, and a show-and-tell of hardware. Because of the openness of the movement it is increasingly being tied to Web 2.0 services.

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As you may recall from last month, UPS recently asked us to create a series of videos, where we explain some of the stuff we talk about here on Techdirt on a regular basis in under two minutes, using a whiteboard. The first video was about the economics of abundance and got a great response. The second video is now up, and it's an attempt to explain the Innovator's Dilemma, based on Clayton Christensen's must-read research. If you're unfamiliar with it, it explains how difficult it is for many companies to adapt to changing markets, and is a good framework for understanding both why some companies are so slow to adapt. More importantly, it provides a good system for thinking about your own company and understanding how to adapt and implement new ideas rapidly: Again, with only two minutes, I had to simplify things down a bit, but hopefully it will kick off another good discussion on the innovator's dilemma and how to deal with it. We still have one more video to go, which I believe will be posted sometime next month. And, yes, once again (though, it should be obvious), UPS sponsored these videos, though we had free rein in creating the scripts -- which should be quite obvious as the topic is one we talk about here frequently enough.

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MikeChino writes "Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air-dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Click here for higher-rez image.

Anthony Citrano says,

Being an observer (and occasional shooter) of all things fashion, I was just was looking at December's "W" cover [above and left] with Demi Moore.

In the interview she says she'd rather be a "puma" than a "cougar" - but apparently, the clumsy Photoshop artist decided she was looking too strong in the cover shots - and awkwardly chopped off part of her left thigh. Note how the upper part of her left thigh/hip is basically missing (our right). Did she have some sort of weird car accident that left a wedge of meat missing from it? The fabric even magically floats above the missing thigh. Ha!

Hard to believe that made it to the cover.

I feel about this the same way I did about the Ralph Lauren model. I don't buy (in the high fashion context, anyway) that there's necessarily too much "Photoshopping", or too much of a drive toward uber-skinny (which really seems to be a complex thumbing-of-the-collective nose at western indulgence by the fashion industry - another conversation entirely) but simply that it's bad art (in the sense such mistakes clearly interfere with the photographers goal - let's call it "aesthetus interruptus").

When I look at it I can't appreciate it because I feel like there's a piece of dirt stuck in my eyeball. A neon arrow pointing at the fuckup. When I see images like this I:

1. feel bad for the photographer;
2. feel bad for the subject;
3. feel like someone, somewhere, is a dumbass.

Doesn't anyone look at these fucking pictures before they go to press?

Fashion designers, art directors, and yes, even we photographers are often trying to be fantastical and aspirational, not necessarily realistic -- but when they make clumsy mistakes, completely miss the mark, and end up making people look like mutants, I get to make fun.

It's here! The Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest launches today! Put on your thinking caps and dream up some awesome gadgets! To celebrate the release of the newest Alex Rider book, Crocodile Tears, and the Kids of All Ages edition of MAKE (both at bookstores today), we're thrilled to be running this contest.

All of you adventure-seekers and gadget lovers out there are invited to join in. If you were Alex Rider, what gadget would you want in the upcoming adventure "Crocodile Tears"? Design your dream Alex Rider gadget, inspired by an everyday object (i.e. an iPod, toothpaste, a pen). The winning gadget will be built right here at the MAKE Labs. Send us a schematic of what your gadget is made from and how it works. (Your schematic can be a diagram, a drawing or an explanation by you). Remember that the winning gadget will be inspired by an everyday object that one could realistically build (as much as we wish we could create a pair of scissors that could fly us to the moon)!

So what do you do? Dream up a gadget, of course! And what could you win? We're so glad you asked:

Grand Prize (one winner):

• A signed collection of hardcover Alex Rider novels
• iPod nano with a personalized message from author Anthony Horowitz
  
• A backpack full of goodies and gadgets from the Maker Shed
• The opportunity to have the winner's dream gadget produced in MAKE Labs and featured on Make: Online
  

Runner-Up Prize (two winners):

• A signed hardcover copy of Crocodile Tears
• An Alex Rider t-shirt

With prizes this good, how could you not want to enter?! The Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest is open to kids ages 8 to 18, so get your kid, nephew, niece, grandkids, and yourself involved!

Need some inspiration? Check out these gadgets and book excerpts from previous Alex Rider novels to get those brain juices flowing:

• Alex Rider's Radio Mouth Brace
• Alex Rider's Smokescreen Bike Pump
• Alex Rider's Geiger Counter Game Console
• Alex Rider's High Tensile Yo-Yo
  

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The Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest launches TODAY! We're giving away two copies of the newest Alex Rider book, Crocodile Tears, by Anthony Horowitz! The book comes out today as well, so win one here before others have a chance to scoop them up in stores. Just leave a comment in this post and tell us why you or your kid(s) needs one of these books. That's all you need to do to enter! Please make sure you include your email address in the comment form field (it won't be published). All eligible comments will be closed by Noon PST on Sunday, November 22nd. Good luck!

More:

• Alex Rider's Radio Mouth Brace
• Alex Rider's Smokescreen Bike Pump
• Alex Rider's Geiger Counter Game Console
• Alex Rider's High Tensile Yo-Yo
  

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Dutch soccer player Robin van Persie who plays for the Arsenal and Netherlands teams is seeking an unusual medical treatment for partially-torn ankle ligaments that have sidelined him. He's headed to Serbia for a massage with placenta fluid. From The Guardian:

Speaking to Dutch television programme Studio Voetbal, the Arsenal striker revealed: "I will fly to the Balkans to meet with a female doctor who helped [PSV Eindhoven midfielder] Danko Lazovic. She is vague about her methods but I know she massages you using fluid from a placenta. I am going to try. It cannot hurt and, if it helps, it helps. I have been in contact with Arsenal physiotherapists and they have let me do it."

"Arsenal's Robin van Persie to soothe ankle pains with placenta massage" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Three homeless men in Russia were arrested for allegedly killing a man, eating some of him, and then selling hunks of his flesh to a kebab kiosk. From Reuters:

"After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies," the prosecutor's main investigative unit for the Perm region said.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers.

"Body parts sold to kebab stand, police say"

AdamWill writes "The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There's a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Staff at a "major" cellular carrier in the U.K. sold millions of customer records to other companies, according to the BBC. Unfortunately, the British regulators are protecting the carrier's right to anonymity, so we don't know which one it is. Any guesses? Update: T-Mobile 'fessed.

Someone once told me that Viacom's top lawyer, Michael Fricklas, has been known to read Techdirt on occasion. I have no idea if this is true, but it still is interesting to watch him give a lecture to some Yale law students where he offers a somewhat nuanced position on copyright issues (thanks to JJ for being the first of many to forward the video to us), but which repeatedly seems to leave out certain pertinent facts: He starts out by saying that he's a strong supporter of fair use, and doesn't like the idea of having to get licenses for creating new works -- but is concerned about the "exact copy" problem. So, basically he's in favor of fair use for creating new works, but not direct distribution.

He discusses copyright vs. free speech -- and insists that there's no "tension" between the two (despite many recent studies suggesting the exact opposite). Of course, he does a bit of a twist there, by saying that copyright is pro-free speech because it creates incentive for speech. The problem with this statement is that while that's the theory, the evidence for it is somewhat lacking. However, there is tremendous evidence of cases where copyright is used to stifle speech -- and of all the massive extensions and changes in copyright laws over the past 200 years, almost all have served to stifle more speech than they have encouraged.

He then trots out the industry's own numbers claiming how much copyright contributes to the economy, even though those numbers are based on a variety of questionable assumptions, including the idea that all content covered by copyright is only created because of copyright. Along those lines, he also credits copyright for things like the iPod and the Kindle, saying that no one's buying those devices just to look at them. This is correct -- but note the trick. He did not say that it was content that drove the iPod and the Kindle, but copyright. He's wrong. It's content. Not copyright.

He notes that some say that "unlicensed IP" might drive this innovation, but he favors "sustainable innovation" (as if anyone doesn't). And then he makes this odd statement:

"A more sustainable innovation is one where, if you make an investment, you have the opportunity to make a return."

Now, that's a great (by which we mean, useless) statement, because it's obviously true. Who would ever deny that? But it's a sneaky and disingenuous statement, because it implies something that's simply not true: that without copyright or without restrictive licensing, the investors do not have an opportunity to make a return. As we've shown over and over again, plenty of content creators who "free" their IP have not only made a return, but have made a better return than they did under older models that relied on copyright. But it's a sneaky trick that's often used by folks in this debate. You set up this strawman argument and then knock it down, despite the fact that no one ever made the argument, and you argue that something is fact (that you can't make a return) when it's empirically false. It's frustrating that this argument still gets made and people should really start calling the folks who make it out whenever they state such falsehoods.

Later, he talks about the "losses" from piracy, insisting that the findings come from a "sophisticated" analysis, not just from counting all downloads as lost sales. Of course, these numbers came from the same study process that led to some results that even the MPAA (of which Viacom is a major member) had to later admit were bogus. This is also the same "sophisticated analysis" that includes ripple effects in one direction only, so it's actually double, triple, quadruple, quintuple counting some numbers, while totally ignoring how those numbers actually help the industry in other ways. So, sorry if I don't take those loss numbers seriously, no matter how "sophisticated" he thinks they are. They're not. They're only "sophisticated" in how misleading they are.

He does have a short discussion on RealNetworks' RealDVD offering, which he implies enables piracy -- even as he admits he wants the functionality, where he could move a copy of a legally purchased DVD to his hard drive for backup or other viewing, but says his "concern" is that people would do this with Netflix DVDs. He believes that the problem with this is that RealNetworks had to break the encryption put in place by the studios. Notice, again, what Fricklas conveniently leaves out. First, he leaves out the fact that it is already legal for people to make backup copies of content they legally own -- but, thanks in part to Hollywood lobbying, Hollywood itself can block that right, simply by putting encryption on something and then saying that you can't circumvent it without breaking the law (thank you, DMCA anti-circumvention clause). He also leaves out (conveniently) the fact that RealDVD doesn't actually "break" the encryption and that the resulting copy still includes DRM that prevents copies. The fact that he's "concerned" about the Netflix model is of no consequence whatsoever. McDonalds is "concerned" about Burger King, but that doesn't give them a legal right to block them from being in business.

Then he pulls out the ever popular "$200 million movie" myth, which I thought was a favorite of NBC Universal, but I guess Viacom is going with it now as well. It's not a myth that there are movies that cost $200 million. The myth is that people want movies that cost that much. No one watching a movie cares how much it costs. They want good movies, no matter how much they cost. I'm sure people would like some $1 billion or $100 billion movies as well, but that doesn't mean we need to grant Viacom extra special legal privileges to make sure it can make a $1 billion or $100 billion movie profitably. People like good movies. Viacom wants to make profitable movies. We agree. But the $200 million number is meaningless. There are ways to make good movies for both less and more than $200 million and there are ways to make profitable movies even in the face of piracy. The claim that piracy undermines the $200 million movie, which is some sort of "necessity," is simply not supported.

On top of that, he tosses out the debunked claim that if something is "free" it means it's devalued. That's simply not true, no matter how many times people repeat it. If it were true, and the content had no value, no one would want it. Value and price are two separate things.

Then, he discusses the "Kanye West" MTV Video Awards "Imma let you finish..." example, by talking about how Viacom used various filtering tools to pull that clip off of various "unlicensed" user uploaded video sites. But he also talks about how they drove people to use the official Viacom clip, which allowed them to "participate in the benefit" of the video. Now, that's interesting, and it's great that they put their own clips up and made them embeddable. But, again, it's important to note what he left out. In forcing everyone to view the content through Viacom directly, it also increased Viacom's own cost in terms of bandwidth. The advantage of letting others help host and distribute the content is that it actually eases that cost.

His discussion on kicking people off the internet via a "three strikes" mechanism is getting much of the attention on other sites, because he mentions, totally in passing, that suing users "feels like bullying." This may sound like a big deal -- and certainly some other sites (and industry lawyers) are making it out like a big revelation, but it's not. The movie industry has never sued individuals for such things -- only the recording industry has. And even way back in the Jack Valenti days, he talked about why he didn't like the idea of suing individuals. So, this isn't a shift in positioning at all. Rather, it's a repeat of the new silly strategy of some in the industry to try to pretend that kicking people off the internet is "consumer relief." Not quite. Shooting someone in the leg instead of the head is certainly "better," but I doubt that the person shot in the leg considers it "relief."

Oh yes, he also fails to explain how any of that will make more people buy.

Towards the end of that discussion, though, he makes another interesting statement, saying that: "there's no way to deal with this problem other than to move viewing into licensed contexts." Except, that's not true. There are other ways. It's called setting up a business model where people actually do have a reason to buy things, whether they view the content in a licensed or unlicensed manner. I recognize he's on the legal side, rather than the business side, but the idea that the "only" way to deal with piracy is to attack it, rather than embrace it, is a position that the industry long ago should have learned was a mistake.

His final point is discussing how DRM "enables new business models," and he more or less dismisses criticism of DRM as really just being criticism of "bad" DRM (of which there is plenty). However, what struck me, was how none of the "new business models" he described actually required DRM at all. You could do them all in some way entirely without DRM. All the DRM does is add restrictions. Of course, rather than adding restrictions, why doesn't the industry focus on employing new business models that give users more and make them want to buy, rather than trying to enforce artificial limitations?

On the whole, it is an interesting video, and well worth watching, but it conveniently misstates or leaves out important facts throughout. Unfortunately, the Q&A session that follows the presentation wasn't included, so I have no idea if any of the students challenged some of his assertions or pointed out some of the points that he left out. Anyway, maybe we can hope that Fricklas is, in fact, an occasional reader here and can stop by to address those questions and omissions.

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Like Tetris, but tired of playing it alone in the dark on your Game Boy? Well, now you can rejoice, for Luyza Pereira and Bettina Hiel have brought Tetris into the era of physical computing with their installation Tetris meets Arduino. The result is about what one would expect, and with the addition of a tilt sensor to turn the blocks, looks like a pretty fun game. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any details of the build available, however it should be pretty straightforward to re-make. [via dudecraft]

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eldavojohn writes "The apocalyptic film 2012 has dominated the box office, taking in $65 million on opening weekend. But with all those uninformed eyeballs watching the film, NASA has found itself answering so many common questions that their Ask an Astrobiologist blog offers calming, professional reassurance that there is no planet Nibiru, nor will it collide with Earth (although I do recall a massive solar storm forecast). NASA's main site even offers a FAQ answering similar questions. NPR has more on NASA scientist David Morrison and his efforts to calm the ensuing public hysteria, but survivalists are already planning for the big one. Pretty funny, right? Not according to Morrison: 'I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, "I'm so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won't suffer?" And I don't know how to answer those questions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Designed exclusively for paranormal investigators, this incredible tool has everything you need to track and detect the presence of ghosts."

For my third and final SPARK project, I'm going to continue building on lessons learned from Project 1 and Project 2. I've found Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 to be a powerful tool, but getting started is not a trivial process. Despite a sophisticated IDE, configuring and building running systems can be challenging, especially when the hardware isn't working as expected. So I'm going to continue where I left off with Project 2, and create the building blocks to control external devices using a serial interface.

A number of my projects have required wireless communications. I've tried many wireless systems, and one of my favorites is the XBee transceiver from Digi. They are easy to configure and use, and there is a wealth of example code to drive them from a wide variety of computing platforms. The high-power version can transmit over long distances, and at 250kbps, the data rate is excellent. I frequently use the devices as a simple wireless serial link, although they are very effective for point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-point communications.

Follow my exploration of Windows Embedded CE driving xBees on the Microsoft SPARK site!

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Mark just boinged a link to this cool magazine how-to from 1961 (.pdf) by Roy L. Clough, Jr. It's hosted at Cigar Box Nation. [via Boing Boing]

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I got all the enjoyment I can get from this pitcher by looking at the photo. No need to spend $22, as the milk I buy already comes in a carton. Heffer pitcher

CNETNate writes "Do Opera Mobile, Skyfire, or Mozilla's Fennec have the power to take down the BlackBerry browser, IE on Windows Mobile, or Safari on the iPhone? This lengthy test aimed to find out. Speed, Acid3 compliance, JavaScript rendering capabilities, and general subjective usability were all tested and reviewed. So were Opera Mini and the default Symbian browser, but these two were unable to complete some of the tests and benchmarks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's difficult not to become even more cynical when you read stories like the following one. Sent in by Eric Goldman, it's about a state law in California that was mainly written by two lawyers: Joaquin Avila, a law professor from Seattle, and Robert Rubin, the "legal director" for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. So, here's the interesting thing: since this state law has been put in place (seven years ago), the only lawsuits have been brought by Rubin's committee or Avila and they've made themselves over $4 million with a few more lawsuits pending and a bunch more threatened (again, all from either Avila or Rubin's committee).

What a great deal: write a law, and then be the only lawyers to use the law to make millions.

As for the law itself, it was a law that apparently very few people were asking for -- requiring that state courts carve out specific districts that favor minority groups, so they are not excluded from local elections. Here's how the AP describes it:

The California statute targets commonly used "at-large" elections -- those in which candidates run citywide or across an entire school district. Avila said that method can result in discrimination because whatever group constitutes the majority of voters can dominate the ballot box and block minorities from winning representation. As a remedy, the law empowers state courts to create smaller election districts favoring minority candidates.

Officials in several California communities said they never heard complaints of voter discrimination until the lawyers stepped forward. In one case, the Tulare Local Healthcare District, now known as Tulare Regional Medical Center, was sued even though its five-member governing board is a rainbow of diversity -- two emigres from India, a Hispanic, a black and a white. The lawsuit argues Hispanics, who make up about a third of local voters, have been shortchanged.

Of course, there are many reasons why the exact makeup of a governing board might not match the exact percentage of the population (including the simple fact that most people vote on issues, not the ethnicity of the people they're voting for). But, even if there was a problem it seems highly questionable that the two lawyers who wrote the bill are now profiting tremendously from it and appear to be the only ones who do so.

It's stories like this one that make us so nervous about so much legislation. This is the type of law they create: it maysound good (who's going to argue against diversity?). But, the actual law appears to have been nothing more than a way for these lawyers to go around collecting millions, while disrupting communities and schoolboards, and sending their taxpayer money to these lawyers.

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The Lung Flute is a simple device that uses sound waves to vibrate wads of mucus in your chest cavity until they rip apart and become more easily cough-up-able. (For better or for worse, the ultimate "results" of using the Flute are not shown in the above video.) Handy, certainly. But why, you may be wondering, would such a thing end up on Popular Science's list of The Best Innovations of 2009? Easy. It's because you and your common cold are not the primary audience for a Lung Flute concerto.

The idea for the horn came one night in 1985. Hawkins, an acoustics engineer, and his colleagues began brainstorming how they could use sound to mess with various bodily functions. They joked about what frequency a toilet would need to vibrate at to force an uncontrollable bowel movement and, slightly more seriously, a way to dislodge goo in sick people's lungs. Months later, Hawkins was reminded of that discussion when he learned that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a group of lung diseases that includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, makes breathing tough for 10 million people, and causes 127,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. "It's the number-four cause of death in the U.S.," he says. "I thought, 'Yeah, I should do something about this.' "

Today, doctors in Japan use the $40 Lung Flute as a tool to collect sputum from patients suspected of carrying tuberculosis, and in Europe and Canada it's used to help test phlegm for lung cancer. Clinical trials in the U.S. have shown that it is at least as effective as current COPD treatments. At press time, Hawkins expected the device to receive FDA approval any day, and says the reusable device could also provide home relief for patients with cystic fibrosis, influenza and asthma.

The Pied Piper of Mucus from Popular Science

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user JeffK, via CC.

Santa's got the coolest tools. How else could he and his elves build all those gifts in time? Now, thanks to custom fabrication services, we can all get access to the Santa Claus Machines. From bespoke action figures, to interplanetary terrain models, from one-of-a-kind sneakers, to tailor-made machine parts, there has never been a better time to harness advanced fabrication tools to build objects of your own design! In this gift guide we'll look at some of the leaders in the Santa Claus Machine revolution.

Big Blue Saw
If your gift plans call for something sturdier than wood or acrylic, you may need to move beyond laser cutters into a full-blown CNC machine shop. Enter Big Blue Saw. They have an intuitive browser-based CAD program where you can design your part, and then choose your material (aluminum, steel, etc.) and thickness. They'll fire up their water-jet machines, and in no time you'll have that rolled steel stocking stuffer in your hands.

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Yusynth has a nice PCB layout for building a classic voltage-controlled Moog filter. This particular iteration appeared in MiniMoog synths, utilizing Robert Moog's signature transistor ladder design for sweet, sweet analog sounds.

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judgecorp writes "UK company Iceotope has launched liquid-cooling technology which it says surpasses what can be done with water or air-cooling and can cut data centre cooling costs by up to 93 percent. Announced at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon, the 'modular Liquid-Immersion Cooled Server' technology wraps each server in a cool-bag-like device, which cools components inside a server, rather than cooling the whole data centre, or even a traditional 'hot aisle.' Earlier this year, IBM predicted that in ten years all data centre servers might be water-cooled." Adds reader 1sockchuck, "The Hot Aisle has additional photos and diagrams of the new system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Spikenzie Labs shares some glamour shots of the new Hardcopy Arduino prototyping board -

Designed to make a permanent version (or Hardcopy if you will) of your project once you have perfected it on a breadboard but without the expense of embedding your original Arduino into your project. The hardcopy also makes your project more reliable and robust. With the prototyping area integrated into the board with the microprocessor, your project will have fewer boards and fewer wires, and because of that, fewer mistakes and fewer shorts.

An interesting option for those who'd rather keep their Duemilanove for developing future projects.

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Bryce Bayer, inventor of the color filter array used to determine color in virtually every modern digital camera has been given the UK Royal Photographic Society's Progress Award. Commonly known as the Bayer filter or Bayer pattern, his invention of a pattern of red, green and blue filters allows a light (but not color) sensitive sensor to record a broad range of colors in similar proportions to the sensitivity of the human eye. The work, conducted while working for Kodak, was patented in 1975 and originally described a system intended for recording video.

Tim O'Reilly is going to give a keynote at the Web 2.0 conference about the War of the Web. You should read his piece, many good points, I agree with most of it.

The tech industry sure loves its wars.

And death. This is dead that is dead, everyone is dead, but me.

Isn't that every child's fantasy -- to have all the world to himself, to be able to drive any car, eat any food, play with any toy, and not have to share with anyone?

The other day I read that the URL was dead.

Anyway one thought I'd like to share.

If there's going to be a war for the web, fine, I already know what I'll do. I'll build the refugee camps. They will be very nice. Hiltons. You can have a beautiful ocean view or a view of the battlefield.

We'll all take pictures from our balcony.

So have a nice war, techies.

Nearly a year ago, we questioned whether or not Hulu could survive. It's not that we don't think the product is well done or well liked. Other than the annoying regional restrictions which pisses off lots of people, the overall service is quite nice. The problem is that there are just way too many conflicts to deal with. The company is owned, in large part, by the networks, and that's leading to all sorts of pressure and complaints about how ads are sold and whether or not there should be a subscription service. From what I've heard, the folks at Hulu understand quite well how an internet-age company should act. The company's rather honest explanation for its fight with Boxee certainly suggested the problem was at a different level than with Hulu management. But... with Hulu having most of its ownership from legacy industries, combined with having so many different players involved in the ownership, it shouldn't come as a surprise at all that the company is now coming under pressure to do things (subscriptions, limits, etc.) that will certainly kill off whatever good has been done. And, since some of the pressure is actually coming from the cable guys as well (who view Hulu as a huge threat), this will only get worse if, as is widely expected, Comcast completes its purchase of NBC Universal.

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eldavojohn writes "Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013. And the problem with just opening more uranium mines is that nobody really knows where to go for the next big uranium lode. Dr. Michael Dittmar has been warning us for some time about the coming shortage (PDF) and has recently uploaded a four-part comprehensive report on the future of nuclear energy and how socioeconomic change is exacerbating the effect this coming shortage will have on our power consumption. Although not quite on par with zombie apocalypse, Dr. Dittmar's final conclusions paint a dire picture, stating that options like large-scale commercial fission breeder reactors are not an option by 2013 and 'no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE, Volume 20 is on newsstands today! Check out this preview video to get a tour of our best edition yet (we know, we say that every time)!

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

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video.

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Microsoft permanently banned about a million hacked Xbox 360s from its online gaming network. Amid uncertainty--you can still play offline--the price of a used 360 collapses. Ebay's warning people not to buy them at all. But so far, some sellers are being honest: is $40 not a great deal for an otherwise working Xbox 360 that can't go online?

Hey, New Yorkers! I'm reading from and signing my new novel Makers tonight at the Borders in Columbus Circle at 59th Street, starting at 7PM. Hope to catch you there! Philadelphians, you're next -- Philadelphia Free Library on Friday, then Philcon (in Cherry Hill, NJ) over the weekend.

US/Canada Tour

buzzboy writes "If you're wondering what the folks over at KDE have been cooking up for the next major release, KDE 4.4, well, quite a bit as it turns out. In a lengthy interview, KDE core developer and spokesperson for the project Sebastian Kugler details the myriad changes that are coming with the 4.4 release — the fifth major release since KDE 4.0 debuted to much criticism nearly two years ago. The project has closed about 18,000 bugs over the past six months and the pace of development is snowballing. The 'heavy-lifting' in libraries and frameworks for 4.0 is now starting to pay off. Perhaps the biggest change is in the development of a semantic desktop. According to Kugler, 'If you tag an image in your image viewer, the tag becomes visible in your desktop search. That's how it should be, right?' There is also a picture gallery of KDE 4.4 (svn) screenshots so you can see what it will look like."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comparing actual, recorded H1N1 deaths to estimated annual seasonal flu deaths is like comparing "the number of flu deaths with the number of Subarus sold in Canada." (You gotta love mathematicians who give good quote.) The Canadian Press explains where the annual flu death estimates come from and why we probably won't really know how bad H1N1 was until 2011. Pro tip: CP Reporter Helen Branswell is one of the best medical journalists out there. If you want to understand what's going on with the Hiney Virus, read her work.

Reader Cannen alerts us to yet another column by yet another old school newspaper guy whining about the fact that "the people" now have the ability to have their voices heard. What's funny is that his own column seems to contradict his statements.

Don't get me wrong. I am also an outraged narcissist, but I had to work six-hour shifts in Bakersfield, Calif., to earn my stripes as a communicator. Nowadays, having a Twitter page qualifies a person to give commentary on CNN. I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events. I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion.

Ah yes, so because today it's easier for people to have a voice, it's bad. Yes, and you used to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and television was called radio and had no pictures. But the world improves and progress comes along and gives more people a voice and that's bad how exactly?

With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and texting, now almost any fool can set up his or her broadcast hub. Then the likes of CNN, Fox News, Oprah and even the Tribune play right into their hands, giving them instant access to the rest of the world. I beseech the online editors at this paper to turn off the "comments" after each article. If people have opinions about something that they've just read, let them write a letter to the editor.

Yes, but "any fool" doesn't get quite the attention as, say, a fool who blasts the fact that people have a voice in a major national newspaper, right? Who cares that anyone can say what they want. Most people don't see those complaints. You call it a "broadcast hub" but most people's Twitter accounts don't have very many followers. That's not the issue at all. The actual complaint seems to be that CNN and Fox and others have elevated a few of these folks (a tiny percentage of the overall population using these tools), and you don't like it because.... what, exactly? Because they compete with you in being a public "fool"?

Most of my career has been spent in radio, where call-in comments are somewhat encouraged. The main difference is that we can hang up on people.

Ok, let me get this straight. Before you were complaining that CNN and Fox were putting these people on their shows, but then you say at least on radio you could "hang up on people." Do you not sense the contradiction? CNN and Fox can just as easily "hang up" on these people too. So what's the difference?

Basically, it sounds like the guy is pissed off that he's no longer the only person with an opinion getting heard. But, of course, he's missing the point in blaming the new technology. Yes, lots of people have a voice, but most still don't get heard very far. The folks who are getting on TV or are making their voices heard are because they're saying something that resonates, whether it's stupid or not. And, no, maybe they didn't have to practice being a public moron in some small town first, but is that really a necessity?

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My father recently drew my attention to an article in IEEE Spectrum about the so-called "Zink" printing technology commercialized by a group of former Polaroid employees. Zink, an acronym for "zero ink," uses special paper with three layers of embedded dye crystals activated by heaters in the print head. Solely by controlling the temperature and duration of heat pulses delivered by the print head, the yellow, magenta, and/or cyan layers may be selectively activated. It is essentially a refinement of the black-only thermal printing technology commonly used, for example, in cash registers and label makers. By eliminating the requirement for ink or toner, Zink promises to produce dramatically smaller and more portable color printers, and has already been incorporated in several "digital polaroid" style cameras with integral photo-printers, such as the Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera. [Thanks, Dad!]

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think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miketron converted his random MIDI note generation software(MAC/PC) into hardware form via an ATMega168 chip -

A couple of months I took my MAX/MSP code for Random7 and rewrote so I could embed it into a hardware version.  Random7 Hardware Version 1 (R7H) is a very basic version of the Random7 software.  The core element of R7H is still the same,  the program pick from 7 different midi notes randomly.  As of now the key R7H is preset to the key of A Major, and the only control is a potentiometer that controls the speed of R7H.  Output for R7H is a midi port, an on/off switch, and there is also a red led the flashes everytime a note is sent.

More pics of the device can be seen over at Illuminated Sounds.

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CNet reports on hearings scheduled to open tomorrow in the US Senate on mysterious charges on thousands of consumers' credit cards. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has been investigating online loyalty programs, which shoppers encounter (often with little comprehension) on the sites of online retailers such as as Continental Airlines, FTD, and Classmates.com. "At the center of the federal probe are Webloyalty, Affinion, and Vertrue, companies that make 'cash-back' and coupon offers to consumers and charge them monthly fees to enroll in their loyalty programs. ... In August, as the government's investigation rolled on, Webloyalty announced that it would alter its ads to require that consumers 'enter the last four digits of their credit or debit card to confirm' they wish to pay the membership fees. Last week, Affinion made similar changes. During the hearing, when the Senate committee is expected to make public the results of a six-month investigation, it will also likely say the alterations made by Webloyalty and Affinion don't go far enough. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whatever you might think of Gartner's research and its silly "magic quadrant" system, I don't think anyone could reasonably question that it was just Gartner's opinion. Yet, a few months ago, we wrote about a company, ZL, that was so upset that Gartner put it in its niche quadrant, rather than the desired "magic quadrant," that it sued. We didn't expect the lawsuit to get very far (similar lawsuits over how Google ranks companies have been **** tossed **** pretty quickly). And, indeed, a judge appears to have found little worthwhile in ZL's lawsuit, quickly dismissing all of the arguments, and noting that Gartner is free to have its own damn opinion, no matter how much others (or the subjects of that opinion) might disagree:

"Finally, ZL argues that Gartner's representation that it provides 'highly discerning research that is objective, defensible, and credible to help [customers] do their job better' implies that its Reports contain objective assertions of fact. Gartner notes that this language appears not in the MQ Report but on its website and that the language describes Gartner's research services generally rather than the MQ Report in particular.... More to the point, the terms 'objective, defensible, and credible' do not imply the assertion of factual information. Gartner argues convincingly that even if its self-description did refer to the statements within the MQ Report, its 'sophisticated readers' -- corporate and government executives and professionals -- would not infer that Gartner's rankings were anything other than opinion."

Still, the judge gave ZL an opportunity to amend the complaint, and the statement from the company indicates that it's planning to try to come up with some other ridiculous argument against Gartner. Maybe it should just focus on satisfying what its customers want, and stop worrying about what some analyst at Gartner has to say.

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Uitgeverij De Vliegende Hollander is the Dutch publisher for Little Brother, and they've really put a big push behind it. Unfortunately, they're also locked into distributing their catalog as DRM-crippled ebooks through an online retailer that is the only major ebook vendor in the Netherlands.

But they're good folks at my publisher, and they're not fond of DRM either. When I asked them if there was some way we could sell the ebook without DRM, they told me that it was impossible (only one major ebook vendor, remember?), but would I mind if they just gave away the ebook in DRM-free ePub form?

Would I mind? That's a dandy solution! Here's a link to the free, DRM-free Dutch ePub version of Little Brother. Tell your (Dutch) friends, and be sure to stay clear of that infected DRM copy that's being sold.

Little Brother ePub (DRM-free) (Thanks, Rienk!)

RobGoldsmith sends in a Space Fellowship piece (which seems to be a press release) about New Zealand's entry into the space age. "Private New Zealand aerospace company Rocket Lab completed its final ground-based test today and is now ready to launch New Zealand into the space race with its Atea-1 launch vehicle. The first high-altitude launch of Atea-1 is scheduled for the end of November this year. Once Atea-1 has successfully concluded the development phase it will be the first privately built rocket launched from the Southern Hemisphere to enter space. The article features a new CGI movie on the launch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marilyn sez, "To kick off Geography Awareness Week, National Geographic asked all the senators in Congress to draw their home states freehand. Some of the results are pretty funny!"

(Shown here: Al Franken's cartographically masterful Minnesota rendering)

Senators: Can You Draw Your State? (Thanks, Marilyn!)

We pointed out recently that Brazil was allowing groups of hackers and security experts to hack their e-voting machines, something that the e-voting industry has always resisted angrily. The e-voting companies have never been able to adequately explain why experts shouldn't be able to try to hack the machines, and all it did was lead to more distrust over the machines. However, the Brazil test has been concluded, and there's some good news: no one was able to crack the machines. However, with all the hack attacks, officials did learn a few things that are helping them to improve the overall process with the machines. It's really amazing that we still don't have something similar happening in the US.

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The 3pi robotics bundle from the Maker Shed includes all the major components needed for programming this fun little bot. The Pololu 3pi robot is a complete, high-performance mobile platform featuring two micro metal gearmotors, five reflectance sensors, an LCD screen, buzzer, and 3 user push buttons, all connected to a C-programmable ATmega168 microcontroller. Just add a few AAA batteries and a USB cable to get programming!

The 3pi robotics bundle includes:

• (1) Pololu 3pi Robot $99.95 value
  
• (1) Orangutan USB Programmer $27.99 value
  
• (1) 3pi Expansion Kit without Cutout $19.99 value
  
• (1) Maker's Notebook $19.99 value
  

Learn how to program the 3pi:

Don't forget to read our How-to Tuesday: Getting started with the 3pi for a lot more information about this little bot.

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75th Trombone writes "I'm a fan of several old PC games — the Myst series, StarCraft, Diablo, etc — with 2D graphics that run at a low, fixed resolution. These games all look horrible on modern LCDs. If you run them at their original resolution, they're tiny, and if you upscale them they get all sorts of blurry, pixelly smoothing artifacts. My ideal goal is to run these games at exactly double their original resolution — running 640 x 480 games at 1280 x 960, for example — so that each original pixel takes up exactly a 2 x 2 block of screen pixels, yielding graphics that are perfectly crisp and decently big. I've tried arcane settings in graphics card drivers (new and old), I've tried forcing the OS to run at a given resolution, and I've tried PowerStrip, all to no avail. Short of writing a new, modern engine for my favorite games, is there a reasonable solution to this problem?" There have been many community-supported graphical overhauls of classic games — feel free to share any you know to work well.

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It is old news that Facebook has a language option for Pirate English. But the mundane and bemusing juxtapositions it creates in the ad column never grow old. [Thanks, Heather!]

destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance — and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were just talking about some indie filmmakers who were happy with the extra attention they've been getting from having their movie "leaked" on BitTorrent, and ChurchHatesTucker alerts us to another story of filmmakers embracing file sharing. This one is actually from a few weeks ago, but a Swedish filmmaker made a low budget indie film called Nasty Old People and released it under a Creative Commons license, along with a request for donations. The link is to Metafilter where there's an interesting discussion about whether or not the experiment is a "success" or a "failure." It's a bit of a mixed bag, as at the time of the discussion, the filmmaker had made back 20% of the film's budget and there were questions if it would get much higher. Thus, it was easy for some to quickly call it a clear failure.

Of course, it's not really that simple. First, I've said for years that I'm no fan of "give it away and pray" business models, which really aren't business models at all. While it works sometimes, it's pretty much a crapshoot, and never strikes me as a real business model. So, on the whole, I'm not too surprised that it didn't bring in much more than 20% of its budget in 2 weeks (though some compare it to blockbuster movies that can often make about the same % of their budgets in the early going.

However, if we compare this situation to what would have happened otherwise (i.e., if the movie were not released this way) the situation becomes a little more interesting. This was a very low budget indie film that likely would not have received any distribution at all. At best, the filmmaker perhaps could have self-printed DVDs, and would have been lucky to have sold a dozen or two. She could have tried to enter it into various film festivals, but that's quite difficult, and even then there's a pretty good chance that the movie doesn't end up actually making any money. Yet, in this case, she not only made money from donations, but the film is getting picked up and shown in theaters around the world. So, compared to that situation, things actually look better than the alternative.

On top of that, while this particular movie may have been a net loss, she could use it for marketing herself. She can go around and show the movie to others, and perhaps use that to get funding for a larger scale project or another film that's released with a bit more of a complete business model. Nasty Old People becomes marketing and a promotion for Hanna Skold. It has to be better resume filler for a filmmaker to talk about tens of thousands of people downloading and watching your film than just going in cold saying you want to make a film. And, in fact, she's already hard at work on a new film script, with many people who became fans of Nasty Old People following along and interested in seeing what the new script is like. So, as a marketing tool, it sure seems like giving this movie away has been quite useful.

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Bonnoe says: "The folks at the TED Prize have been working with partners around the world to fulfill the wish of best-selling author and former nun, Karen Armstrong – the Charter for Compassion. The Charter is a document collaboratively written with contributions from thousands of people from more than 100 countries. With a sense of urgency, the Charter is a call to action for all of us to live more compassionately with each other in the hopes of ending global suffering. People from every corner of the world – including Oslo, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Tehran, Capetown, Sydney, San Francisco, Mumbai and more - have embraced the Charter’s inclusive message by affirming the Charter at the Charter for Compassion website and posting the official widget on their blogs in a show of solidarity (see below). It’s a powerful message and one that we wanted to share."

Charter for Compassion

eldavojohn writes "In a town-hall-style Q&A with (hand-picked) Chinese students in Shanghai, President Obama made several statements knocking China's firewall and censorship. Quoting: 'I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity. And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.' The Washington Post notes that the event was broadcast only on the local level, and in fact Chinese authorities removed from view what little coverage it had gotten, after about an hour. But at least American news media are gobbling it up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fairytale Fashion created by Diana Eng has a great new video with the Drawdio!

We are going to embroider a dress with conductive thread so that it is touch sensitive. What do you imagine happening when the dress is touched and a closed circuit is made?

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StairSteady invented by a 16 year old maker...

When not in use, the handle goes from the square section to a round at either the top or bottom of the stairs and so the handle folds away parallel with the wall and is unobtrusive. This allows the stairs to be used by both those with unlimited and limited mobility in the household.

Invented by Sheffield girl Ruth Amos who won the prestigious Young Engineer for Great Britain award for its creation, the StairSteady is produced in Sheffield, by one of the top engineering companies, to the highest standards and is distributed by her own company StairSteady Ltd.

StairSteady Ltd was set up in 2006 by Ruth Amos, when Ruth was just 16years old. It all began with her GCSE resistant materials project. The original project idea came about when Ruth's teacher's father had a stroke and was told he needed to continue to exercise but was unable to use his stairs. A StairSteady would have enabled him to do that.

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The prize is a $700 HP MediaSmart EX495 PC, set up as a Windows home server, with 1.5TB of storage and Mac/Time Machine support. The winner shall be chosen at arbitrary whim. Runners-up get something random from the gadget dungeon. The theme is "Found in Space." 100 words long. Go!

We've discussed how the UK is used for "libel tourism" quite frequently, since its libel laws are more draconian than elsewhere. Thus, if someone is upset about what someone else has said about them, they'll often file a lawsuit in the UK, arguing that because the content is available online, it's been "published" in the UK. Thankfully, the UK courts have been a bit better about cracking down on these sorts of cases when they're obviously frivolous. In one recent case, the court rejected the claim by noting that there was little evidence many people in the UK saw the article, which was published in a South African publication. Specific evidence over how many UK readers viewed that article were not provided, but log files showed that only a grand total of 65 readers viewed the article at all over the 2 months following publication (so you could even say that if all 65 were in the UK, the "damage" was pretty limited). But, the publication did show that its site normally gets about 6.79% of its visitors from the UK, which would translate to about 4 UK visitors -- not nearly enough to prove "publication" in the UK. It's good to see the UK courts being a bit more careful about these things, though it would still be much better if the UK updated its outdated libel laws to avoid this kind of lawsuit altogether.

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davecb writes "The ACM has been kind enough to print Paul Stachour's and my 'jack' article about Software Maintenance. Paul first pointed out back in 1984 that we and our managers were being foolish — when we were still running Unix V7 — and if anything it's been getting worse. Turns out maintenance has been a 'solved problem in computer science' since at least then, and we're just beginning to rediscover it."

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MAKE subscriber James Theophane writes in to share his project, called My Painting Has Crashed. I like the idea- can I order one to put on my coffin, for when I pass away?

I made this at work the other day. They asked me to contribute a piece of art for our reception. I decided to hack an old replica painting from my local flea market. I built a motor using one of those kits you can buy from a good electronic store, painted acrylic on canvas and glued a spinning beach ball of death cut out of mounting board.

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Artists Chris Reilly and Taylor Hokanson appear to be getting some impressive results from their DIYLILCNC. They certainly aren't the first to develop an open source CNC mill, however their build looks particularly nice. They claim that the whole thing can be assembled for around $700, including the stepper motors and drive electronics. Want to get in on the action? CAD drawings for the parts and build instructions are available on their site, under the Creative Commons license. [via core77]

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Did you know that we offer PDFs of some of the popular projects and primers that have appeared in MAKE magazine? You can always subscribe to the Digital Edition of MAKE or buy a single back issue with the project you're interested in, or you can just download the specific PDF you're looking for. Each download is $1.99.

Here's a list of all the PDFs we currently offer:

The Night Lighter 36 Spud Gun: (Volume 03, page 108)
The Brain Machine: (Volume 10, page 88)
Cigar Box Guitar: (Volume 04, page 77)
Compressed Air Rocket: (Volume 15, page 102)
Wind Power Generator: (Volume 05, page 90)
Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former: (Volume 11, page 106)
Primer: Working With Carbon Fiber: (Volume 09, page 164)
Primer: Printed Circuit Boards: (Volume 02, page 164)
Primer: Welding (Volume 03, page 158)
Primer: Moldmaking (Volume 08, page 160)

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It's quite common for various trademark holders to go through the UDRP domain dispute process to get back domains held by cybersquatters. Still, it's quite impressive to hear that FreeCreditReport.com was able to get 1,017 separate domain names in a single dispute (found via Slashdot) apparently by using some sort of software that identified all the domains. The company that held the domain names argued, in part, that the term "free credit report" should be seen as generic, not a specific trademark, but the arbitration board simply said that since the USPTO had granted FreeCreditReport.com with a trademark, that the trademark was solid -- and thus most domain names that included those words could be turned over.

This does raise some questions however -- since we've seen plenty of other cases where domains that included trademarked terms, but which would not be confusing to users (such as "trademarknamesucks.com"), have been allowed to be used by the original registrant, rather than handed over to the trademark holder. It's unclear, in this case, if some of those domains were like that -- or if they were all pure squatter domains. Still, it's quite an impressive haul by FCR.

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Brian Lam showed me this amazing short video yesterday. It chronicles an encounter that National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen had with a giant leopard seal in Antarctica who, over the course of four days, fed penguins to his camera and tried to teach him how to catch prey.

Hey, Bostonites! I'll see you tonight at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Mass Ave) at 7PM for the US launch of my new novel, Makers! (New Yorkers, and Philadelphians -- see you later this week!)

US/Canada tour

Last week, we wrote about the ridiculous situation, whereby the MPAA had an entire muni-WiFi network shut down because one person using that system had downloaded a single film. The story ended up getting a fair amount of press, and it looks like the MPAA and Sony Pictures in particular, quickly realized that this was really, really bad publicity for the company. After the company got bombarded by complaints, Sony Pictures contacted the town and asked them to turn the WiFi back on, while also claiming it could help the town set up tools to block such things in the future. Of course, as Broadband Reports notes in the above link: "Of course if the MPAA and Sony had approached the network owners like human beings in the first place -- instead of engaging in the kind of scorched earth tactics they've employed for several years now -- they probably wouldn't have gotten the bad press to begin with." But, acting like human beings in the first place isn't the sort of thing the industry does well.

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GringoChapin writes in with coverage from Space.com on the Leonid meteor shower, adding "Folks from the United States will want to start watching at 0100 Pacific, 0400 Eastern, and those in Europe from 0100 local time until dawn." "One of the best annual meteor showers will peak in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, and for some skywatchers the show could be quite impressive. The best seats are in Asia, but North American observers should be treated to an above average performance of the Leonid meteor shower, weather permitting." Sky and Telescope's coverage is excellent as usual, and they also have tips for beginning and advanced meteor observers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.