TheClockworkSoul writes "Scientific American reports on a study published this month in the Journal of Communication, which found that women who engage in a role-playing game online actually commit more time on average than the male players do. The authors surveyed 7,000 players logged in to EverQuest II (PDF), and found that the average age of the gamers surveyed was 31, and that playing time tended to increase with age. Interestingly, however, the female gamers not only tended to log more time online (29 hours per week versus 25 for the males), but were also more likely to lie about how much they really play."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Francesco Fondi, of HobbyMedia, sent us news of this awesome USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A "submarine," and holiday wishes, from Tokyo. Happy holidays to you and everybody at HobbyMedia, Fra!

He writes:

The Japanese modeler Starfleet Yokosuka has built a radio-controlled 1/350 scale replica of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A from the Star Trek series. What makes this model unique is the fact that it "flies" in water! Yes, in Japan there's a new underground hobby of geeks who transform static kits into radio-controlled underwater spaceships!

Radio Controlled USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toys and Games | Digg this!

There have been ongoing arguments and conflicting studies for years over whether or not mobile phones can cause cancer. However, we had thought that the general scientific consensus was that mobile phones have such weak radiation that it is extremely unlikely to have any meaningful impact on causing cancer. Yet, that doesn't stop the worries that have long been associated with (almost always unscientific folks) when it comes to wireless signals. The latest such situation involves a politician in Maine pushing for a law that would put cancer warning labels on mobile phones.

But here's the thing: even if these warnings were put on phones, what would it do? Would people really stop using their mobile phones or make any behavioral adjustment just because of these labels? There might be a few people, but I'd imagine that those who already are sure that mobile phones cause cancer have already acted accordingly. Update: And... just like that, comes the news that San Francisco is considering the same thing.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

rufey writes "I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a monthly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations." Read on for the rest, and offer your advice on the best filesystem for this application.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From swarms of ginormous trilobites to Ida-the-over-hyped-ancient-lemur, National Geographic counts down the Top 10 Dinosaur and Fossil Finds of 2009.

Two Science Questions from a Toddler in the same month? It's a Festivus miracle! Or, you know, the unexpected byproduct of trying to write weekly blog posts during a month where damn-near all the sources you need to talk to are on vacation. But I'm a glass is half-full kind of woman.

Speaking of byproducts, BB reader Tammy says there's a small person in her life who wants to know, "Why is poop brown?"

First off, the fact that this kid's poop is brown is a really good sign. See, your stool can come in several different colors. Brown just happens to be the color of good health.

"Bile comes from your gall bladder and helps your body digest food," said Anish Sheth, M.D., assistant professor at Yale Medical School and author of the book What's Your Poo Telling You? "It's metabolized by the bacteria in your large intestine, leaving behind a byproduct called stercobilin—and it's that stercobilin that gives stool a brown pigment."

Without stercobilin, your poo would actually be a sort of pale, off-grey color, like white clay. This really does happen from time to time, Dr. Sheth said, when something is blocking a patient's bile duct, so that bile can't get from the gall bladder into the intestinal tract. The cause could be as simple as a gall stone, or as ominous as pancreatic cancer.

In fact, the color of poop can offer some surprising insights into what's going on with the human body. In the days before fancy medical technology, doctors looked at the color and texture of poop to help diagnose gastro-intestinal illness. Today, changes in stool are still frequently the first sign that something is wrong. There's three main "wrong colors" your poop can be:

• Red
  Means: Internal bleeding, or that you've recently eaten beets
  
  If it only happens once, it's probably the beets. But ongoing red poop likely means you're bleeding somewhere along your G-I plumbing. If the problem is near the bottom, in the intestines, Dr. Sheth said, the poop will be bright red. But if you're bleeding from the throat or stomach, then the blood will get digested along with whatever you've eaten—leaving you with black, tar-like poop. "It has a very distinctive smell, too. I'm not really sure how to describe it. But once you've smelled it, you don't forget it," Dr. Sheth said.
  
• Yellow
  Means: There's fat in your poop
  
  The yellow color is the least disgusting part of this problem. Fatty poop also smells way worse than normal and it tends to float. "Like an oil slick," Dr. Sheth said. That's not a good thing, to put it mildly. In general, your body ought to be able to digest and absorb fat. If it's not, there's probably something wrong with your digestive system.
  
• Green
  Means: You've probably got a bacterial infection
  
  A particular kind of bacteria that can infect your colon can also turn your poop green—the color is a direct result of the presence of bacteria in the poop.
  

While I had Dr. Sheth on the line, I decided that I had to ask him the ultimate "Why does my poop look like that" question. Oh yes, I asked about corn.

"There are a lot of things that we can't fully digest. I call it 'Deja Poo'. Corn is just the most common example," Dr. Sheth said.

The key is fiber. There's two kinds: Soluble and insoluble. If what you eat has a lot of insoluble fiber, it'll come out your other end mostly intact, because your body can't digest it. The foods that contain insoluble fiber foods are almost all plants, Dr. Sheth said, because humans haven't evolved the enzymes necessary to break down some plant cell walls. In the case of corn, some of the plant is soluble fiber and some isn't.

"There's two parts of the corn—the exterior kernel that we pass through and the germ inside of it. The germ is actually extracted. The whole kernel is immersed in digestive enzymes and your body pulls out what it can use," Dr. Sheth said. "What it can't use just passes on."

Ask Dr. Sheth your poop-related questions at his Web site, Dr. Stool

Image courtesy Flickr user GregtheBusker, via CC

ink writes "Gizmodo has completed a 12-city test of 3G cellular bandwidth speed. Verizon won four of the twelve, however AT&T scored higher with six: 'Let's get this straight right away: We didn't test dropped voice calls, we didn't test customer service, and we didn't test map coverage by wandering around in the boonies. We tested the ability of the networks to deliver 3G data in and around cities, including both concrete canyons and picket-fenced 'burbs. And while every 3G network gave us troubles on occasion, AT&T's wasn't measurably more or less reliable than Verizon's.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just spotted this nifty concept by Thingiverse user cathalgarvey. He calls it a "DremelFuge." It's a centrifuge attachment for your drill or motor-tool that holds six Eppendorf tubes. Dunno how well it would actually work, as it looks heavy to mount in a Dremel tool, and most drills don't spin nearly that fast. Still, clever thinking.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in 3D printing | Digg this!

One day, towards the end of summer, I walked into my living room and found my cats playing "Secret CIA Prison" with a bat. He was alive, but just barely. He lay on my floor twitching, his wings torn to Swiss cheese. The cats looked up at me as if to say, "We do good work, yes?" I locked them in the bedroom and called the vet. Fortunately, the cats were all up on their shots. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell the vet how the bat had gotten into the house, nor how long he'd been there.

"You should maybe call your doctor," she said.

On average, 55,000 people worldwide die from rabies every year, but only two or three of those cases happen in the United States, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals and availability of post-bite treatment for humans. Today, when Americans die of rabies, it's usually because they didn't realize they'd been bitten until it was too late—which is to say, when they first noticed symptoms.

See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don't even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.

It's a mystery that makes doctors understandably nervous. Just a week before I found my bat, some friends of mine in St. Paul had woken up to find a bat in their bedroom. Being asleep is one of those times when tiny bat teeth could bite you without you being aware of it. My friends had to get post-exposure prophylaxis, a treatment designed to neutralize any rabies virus in your system before it has a chance to reach your brain and develop into a full-blown infection.

"You think about flu, that's a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it's passed. But rabies incubation is very long," said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. "It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system."

That means five doses of vaccine, over the course of 28 days, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If there's also an obvious bite, doctors will clean the wound and apply rabies antibody serum to the site. The antibodies are basically the key part of a lock-and-key system that tells your immune system to destroy anything the key fits. The idea is that antibodies will help destroy most of the virus at the site of entry, while the vaccine will train your body to knock out any strays it finds elsewhere. The CDC also recommends a shot of antibodies, separate from the vaccine, even if there is no obvious bite.

This one-two punch is almost 100% effective, provided you get it in time. How fast is "in time"? Nobody really knows. The CDC says that, as long as a bite victim isn't yet symptomatic, they should get the prophylaxis. Dr. Fu said that the window of opportunity can vary in length, depending on how close the bite is to the person's central nervous system. Without post-exposure prophylaxis, rabies is fatal. By the time symptoms--fever, confusion, partial paralysis, difficulty swallowing--appear, it's too late. There's not much doctors can do after that, because they aren't even sure what the virus is doing to you.

"We don't know how rabies kills people. There are some unproven hypotheses, but that's it," Dr. Fu said. "One idea is that, once the infection reaches the neurons in the brain, it blocks the transmission of messages from the brain to the rest of the body. If that's the case, it could explain many of the phenomenon we see in humans and animals, such as end-stage paralysis. That could even be why humans die, because of paralysis of muscles in the heart and lungs."

Given the lack of information and the risk of death, it's not surprising that even a situation like mine, where a bite was extremely unlikely, ended with a referral to a nearby hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis. But, after several conversations between the emergency room doctor and the Minnesota state rabies hotline, I ended up not getting it. Turns out, sneak-attack bites don't really happen to wide-awake, sober, cognitively normal adults in the middle of the day. The chance that I or my husband were actually bitten by the bat before the cats set upon it was so small that, on the advice of medical professionals, we decided that it wasn't worth the pain, potential side-effects, or cost of treatment.

That's right. I am my own death panel.

But on the off-chance that I do come down with symptoms—there've been cases of rabies incubating for up to a year—is there really no hope? Well, sort of. Maybe. Ish. Researchers have been experimenting with a treatment that they think could save the lives of people with full-blown rabies. Called the Milwaukee Protocol, it involves putting the patient into a coma and also giving them antiviral medication. The idea is that the human immune system—with some help from antivirals—can fight off a rabies infection, while the coma limits damage to the brain that seems to be a common cause of rabies death. In 2004, a teenage girl who received this treatment became the first person—ever—to survive symptomatic rabies without having received the vaccine either before being bitten, or before symptoms appeared.

The problem: We still don't know whether the Milwaukee Protocol actually works. It's been tried—and failed—at least 13 times since 2004, according to a 2009 paper published in the journal Current Infectious Disease Reports. There are two reported successes, but in one of those the patient received the vaccine before her she became symptomatic. The other success is very recent and there aren't many details available yet.

So why did the first girl survive? Again, nobody knows. It's possible that either she had a particularly hardcore immune system, or the variant of the virus she contracted was particularly weak, or both. When she was diagnosed, she had rabies antibodies in her cerebral spinal fluid—something that would indicate the presence of rabies in her brain—but doctors weren't able to isolate any actual virus—suggesting that her body was already on its way to winning the fight before the Milwaukee Protocol was used.

Unfortunately, any effort to really conquer rabies may be hampered by the fact that the vaccine works so well, Dr. Fu said.

"Treatments haven't been successful because we don't know what it's doing in the brain," he said. "We need more research but, usually, once you have a good vaccine the funding for the research goes away."

New England Journal of Medicine: Survival After Treatment of Rabies With Induction of Coma
Current Infectious Disease Reports: Update on Rabies Diagnosis and Treatment

Image courtesy Flickr user WilsonB, via CC

It's now been over a year since the infamous announcement, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, that the RIAA was going to effectively drop its strategy of suing individuals in favor of agreements, worked out between the RIAA and ISPs with NY AG Andrew Cuomo adding pressure, to kick people off the internet on a "three strikes" regime. The whole thing sounded pretty ridiculous at the time. Cuomo had absolutely no legal standing to pressure ISPs into such a deal, since the ISPs had every legal right to say no. And, since the "leak" many ISPs have insisted, quite vocally, that they have never made any such agreement with the RIAA and that they would never kick their customers offline in such a manner.

And so Greg Sandoval, over at News.com, smartly realizes that these "preliminary agreements" we were told about last year are still nowhere to be found and goes exploring to find out why. Reading between the lines, it appears the answer is that the RIAA flat out lied (no surprise, but...) and the Wall Street Journal bought it (again, no surprise, but...). Basically, with various record labels hemorrhaging money, they started to cut back on their allowance to the RIAA, such that the legal strategy of suing tons of people was getting too expensive. But they didn't want to make it look like they were just giving up.

So they concocted a myth: this idea that ISPs would cut people off. It was, in fact, what the RIAA and other international entertainment industry lobbying groups had been pushing for with little success (since then they have had a few wins on that front, but also many losses). But they couldn't wait for their usual process of pushing through legislation (*cough* ACTA *cough*) to complete before they had to cut back on individual lawsuits. So they brought in Andrew Cuomo, because he had successfully threatened ISPs to get them to cut off Usenet, despite no legal basis for doing so. But, that worked because Cuomo threatened (again, despite no legal basis) to shame them for offering access to child porn. When it came to unauthorized access to music, the moral outrage aspect isn't nearly as strong (not that the RIAA and their lobbyist friends haven't tried six dozen ways to try to link file sharing to child porn -- but most people realize how ridiculous that is).

Given that the ISPs seemed to have little interest (i.e., no interest) in moving forward with this plan, they leaked it to the WSJ, figuring that if ISPs thought others were doing it, then they'd start to sign up, and the whole thing would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Except they failed to account for the simple fact that people protested against any ISP dim enough to think that it's smart to kick off customers based on accusations (not convictions), and ISPs quickly stepped up to deny any such deal, shedding light on the RIAA's big lie.

So, here we are today, with no such agreements in place, and the RIAA back to trying to sneak through "three strikes" legislation through international treaties that they write (which the public has no access to). But, shouldn't someone call them on the fact that they blatantly lied last year? And also, shouldn't someone ask where the WSJ's correction is on that story?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Voltage, Current, and Resistance - three of the most important electrical properties, are elegantly intertwined by way of a simple equation; V = IR, better known as Ohm's Law. Get to know this fundamental tool of electronics engineering - you'll be glad you did!

Download the m4v file or subscribe in iTunes

Related:

• MAKE presents: The LED
• MAKE presents: The Resistor
• MAKE presents: The Capacitor
• MAKE presents: The Transistor
• MAKE presents: The Diode
• MAKE presents: The Integrated Circuit
• MAKE presents: The Inductor

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

eldavojohn writes "Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release, Lifehacker brings word of a video editor that the VLC team is working on dubbed VideoLAN Media Creator. It hasn't been released yet (git clone git://github.com/VLMC/vlmc.git) but a pre-release is due out soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thought making still pictures using light drawing was tough? Check out this impressive animated video for the song Lucky by All India Radio, made by Dee Pee Studios. This technique looks like a ton of fun to try, and unlike traditional video, you don't need special equipment for great results- just a digital camera that can be set to manual exposure mode, and an ample amount of patience. Might be a fun thing to try out over the holidays! [via neatorama]

More:

• LED light-drawing pens
• Animated light pen art
• Cold cathode light painting

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

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

Over the last couple years there's been growing chatter about the rise of "high frequency trading," which is the increasingly sophisticated algorithmically-driven way of financial trading, where it has little to do with how smart your investment philosophy is, but how fast your hardware and algorithms run. As a principle, there's nothing wrong with the concept of high frequency trading. And, as many defenders of the concept point out, such systems, in theory, provide more liquidity to many markets, and basically skim pennies off the top in return for that liquidity. The potential problem, however comes in when such operations take over the market. The latest estimates put high frequency trading at 61% of the market -- up from 30% just five years ago.

That should be a warning sign. It's typical, but you can see it in plenty of previous Wall Street meltdowns as well. After someone figures out a "system" for making lots of money (say, mortgage-backed securities a few years back), everyone starts piling in. Then, the "innovation" occurs. Now, much of it is well-meaning, and even useful. With mortgage-backed securities, things like credit default swaps actually were a very useful insurance tool originally. But at some point, they basically flipped from insurance to gambling. People weren't using them to back up an investment, but as the investment itself -- so you'd actually have what was, in effect, thousands of people all buying an insurance policy that one house wouldn't burn down. If that house burned down... the insurance company (hi, AIG) defaulted, and everything comes crashing down. The problem is that these systems become so complicated that it's actually pretty difficult to figure out what the "trigger" is and how the disaster will spread. No one accurately predicted how the last Wall Street meltdown would occur (though some certainly predicted a meltdown), and the fear with the rise of high frequency trading is that the situation is even more opaque. What's happening is built into the algorithms, and with more and more companies piling in, it's inevitable that some of those algorithms are going to have a bug (or, not even a bug, but basically programming to do something that has serious unintended consequences).

Again, I doubt there's anything nefarious in most of this (unless you consider making money nefarious -- which I don't). But, at some point things get overwhelming, and many are beginning to wonder when we reach that point. I'm all for financial innovation and technology innovation -- but I have to admit to a bit of worry when the tech innovation seems to be taking over to such a level that there's little rationale for the financial side. It's about who has the better techies and hardware, rather than who has the better financial thesis, and that leads to dangerous results, because the purpose of the market is separated from the mechanisms that make the market run. When you get that kind of separation between form and purpose, bad things happen.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

adeelarshad82 writes "The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative outlined its product roadmap for the next three years, a plan that includes the release of tablet-based OLPC by 2012. During the next three years, OLPC plans on releasing two laptops, the first two years' priced around $200 and $150 respectively, before launching a tablet in 2011 for less than $100."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

USB Hourglass from alwynallan on Vimeo.

Over at Make: Online, John Park posted this video of a gadget that generates random numbers by watching sand fall through an hourglass.

It watches falling sand in an hourglass with an optical sensor. That data is sent via the Arduino USB output to the PC where it's analyzed. This entropy is useful for all your random number needs. My favorite part: when the hourglass runs dry a servo motor flips it over and it starts again.

USB Hourglass random number generator

A disturbing ad from days of yore. (Via Vintage Ads)

This man owes his livelihood to Micro-Fluff. Shouldn't you consider a career in Micro-Fluff, too? (Via Mostly Forbidden Zone)

You know how a jar of natural peanut butter separates into two layers: a rock hard layer of solid peanut particles on the bottom, and a liquid layer of oil that splashes onto the kitchen counter and your clothes when you try to stir the two layers together? John Falk Kelly didn't like it when that happened, so he came up with a way to mix peanut butter easily. From Wired's How-To Wiki:

When you buy a jar of all-natural peanut butter, don't stick it in the pantry. Park it on top of the refrigerator, upside down. Once a day, when you walk by it, say "hello peanut butter", and flip it over.

When you're ready to open it and stir it up, it will be half mixed for you (and not hardened into a frustrating marble block).

He says he was so pleased with the results, that filed a patent on it: U.S. Patent # 6,325,533.

I'm thinking someone could make a version of this that used some of the same circuitry and components in the hourglass random number generator project I posted earlier today. The jar of peanut butter would go where the hourglass is. The gadget could either sense the opacity of the oil and flip it when it was no longer translucent, or it could just flip it once or twice a day.

Stir natural peanut butter easily

theodp writes "John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers, this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x as many hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An über-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone who stares quietly into space and then says 'Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Vimeo recently getting sued by EMI for supposedly encouraging infringement of their music in videos, it's interesting to note that Vimeo is apparently arbitrarily and ridiculously aggressive in cutting off anyone who uses the service for any sort of "commercial" purpose (found via Shocklee). The story is quite bizarre, but apparently Vimeo has buried in its terms of service that you can't use the service for commercial reasons -- though almost no one knows this. Yet, Vimeo itself seems to decide rather arbitrarily if your videos are commercial or not and then gives you a 24-hour notice to remove your videos. This is rather disappointing. Vimeo's player is actually quite nice (much nicer than YouTube's), and I've recommended many others to use its service. I had my own odd problem with Vimeo last year when for some unknown reason the company completely deleted my account and locked me out of using the service. Eventually they restored the account, but no explanation for the deletion was ever given (and it made me look bad, because I had been discussing stuff with someone, who then accused me of deleting my posts).

The other oddity is the claim that Vimeo says you cannot embed Vimeo videos on sites that show ads, as that's "commercial use." Once again, we get into the difficulty of figuring out what is commercial use? If I embed a Vimeo video in a blog post is that commercial use? This is a blog, but it's part of our business. Similarly, some of the speeches I've given in the past couple of years were put online using Vimeo. Are these "commercial use"? Are they then commercial use if I happen to embed the video in the blog? What if I embed someone else's video in this "commercial" blog? Like -- as we did with the Vimeo getting sued story -- embedded a video from Vimeo itself? It's nearly impossible to figure out what is and what's not commercial. About the only thing you can say is that you probably shouldn't use Vimeo for anything, because its policies appear to be totally arbitrary and prone to suddenly losing the videos you thought you had legitimately posted.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Space Tweep Society Blog has an overview post up about the pros and cons of the four main types of telescopes, if you're in the market! [Thanks, Rachel!]

(Image: E550 with telescope finder, a Creative Commons Attribution image from R1CARD0's photostream)

In the Maker Shed:

The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders

Our Price: $29.99

Amateur astronomy is now within the reach of anyone, and this is the ideal book to get you started. The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders offers you a guide to the equipment you need, and shows you how and where to find hundreds of spectacular objects in the deep sky -- double and multiple stars as well as spectacular star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies.

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

News of the upcoming NASA MMO, Astronaut: Moon, Mars, and Beyond, has been scarce since its announcement in 2008, but NASA recently revealed that a "mini demo game" is coming in January that will show off some of what they've completed so far. "Moon Base Alpha utilizes actual NASA Constellation program design details developed by NASA for mankind’s return to the Moon in 2020. Timelines in the much anticipated Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond MMO will be set even farther in the exciting future (2035+), but the ability to explore our own near-future moon missions is also planned for in the forthcoming game facilitated by the NASA Learning Technologies and Innovative Partnerships Programs." They're provided a slideshow and a brief video, and one of the developers spoke about the game with Edge last month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like a mostly monochromatic mix of Jason Rohrer's memento mori game Passage and Nintendo's Zelda entry Majora's Mask, Every Day The Same Dream -- the latest game from Faith Fighter and McDonald's Videogame creator Molleindustria -- plays at issues of lives led in quiet, soul-sapping desperation by forcing you to subvert your own easy routines. Created in less than a week as an "Art Game" entry for the ongoing Experimental Gameplay Project (the same that's spawned Canabalt, MinMe and, in its original form, the prototype for World of Goo), Same Dream is as stylish as it is somber, even if it is punctuated by brief bursts of hopefulness and player-led humor. I won't spoil the ending (except to say that it's not half as powerful as the final lead-up to it) -- and yes, it does have an ending -- but it comes fully loaded with a gut-punch for anyone who has been or is currently a wage-slave office drone, and is already a pretty clear frontrunner for the indie release of the week. Play it online here, or download a PC and Mac version by scrolling to the bottom.

Golden Age Comic Book stories has a fun gallery of science fiction themed Christmas covers from Galaxy magazine. The December 1960 issue is very MAKE-y. (I'll bet Phil & Limor's, and Windell & Lenore's trees look just like this!) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Knock out those extraneous RFID tags with the rfiddler, which uses the circuit from a camera flash and a homemade coil to fry unwanted RFID tags. The shape of the device and sound effects seem a bit gratuitous, however the concept is sound. As always, use responsibly. [via technabob]

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

Just posted! Our in-depth review of the Pentax K-x. Despite its compact size and inconspicuous exterior the K-x boasts an impressive feature set that is, in parts, not that far off the semi-pro K-7. In the entry-level segment of the market the new model will be facing fierce competition from the likes of Canon's EOS 500D and the Nikon D5000. Can the Pentax K-x make its mark amongst such well established rivals? Click through to find out.

At the very end of an NPR story about the decade since Napster there's an amusing quote from Eric Garland of online music tracking firm Big Champagne, where he says:

A decade from now, executives may be longing for the days--when they could blame piracy for all of their problems.

Indeed. "Piracy" makes for an easy -- if totally incorrect -- scapegoat. The reality is far different. As we've seen over and over again, those who learn to properly use file sharing to their advantage don't see any "problems" from file "piracy," but actually see it as a huge opportunity. That, alone, makes it clear that piracy has never been the problem, only a failure to adapt. And yet, as we've noted repeatedly, the industry itself is actually thriving. So that raises a separate question. A decade from now, what will industry execs be blaming their problems on? Or, will the old "blame game" execs have moved on, and we'll be in a new industry that doesn't even think of the challenges it faces as problems, but as opportunities?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Treehugger has a slideshow of the best and worst ideas in sustainable transportation from 2009. But, instead of debating the varying merits of this or that electric car, they've left cars out entirely, in favor of planes, trains, bikes and boats. Bikes get the most play here, and there are some innovative ideas—like cargo bikes and bike highways. Treehugger is mostly talking about their use in places like Copenhagen, but I love how Minneapolis' system of limited-access bike trails makes bike travel and commuting faster, easier and more enjoyable. (They're even plowed in winter!)

I do with the slideshow had focused less on the bikes, and more on mass transit and shipping. Mass transportation is a key component in just about every plan for lowering greenhouse gas emissions, but it doesn't get nearly as much attention as every random attempt to revamp the personal car. There is, however, some interesting stuff about high-speed trains and early developments in alternative-fuel aviation.

Treehugger: Best and Worst of 2009: The Year in Bikes, Trains, Planes and Boats

destinyland writes "This article asks, 'Why bother to type a document using a keyboard when you can write it by simply thinking about the letters?' A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can 'type' using just their minds. The study involved electrocorticography — a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of the brain after a surgical incision into the skull. ('We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy,' explains one Mayo clinic neurologist.) And besides typing, there's new brain wave applications that can now turn brain waves into music and even Twitter status updates — by thought alone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is my new, favorite random number generator (old favorite: lava lamps):

It watches falling sand in an hourglass with an optical sensor. That data is sent via the Arduino USB output to the PC where it's analyzed. This entropy is useful for all your random number needs. My favorite part: when the hourglass runs dry a servo motor flips it over and it starts again.

Says maker Peter Allan:

With the USB Hourglass, the user can look at the sand falling through the center of the hourglass and monitor the randomness in the USB output data. And one can read the code line-by-line, compile it, and upload it to the microcontroller using only open-source and widely supported tools.

USB Hourglass

[Thanks, Scott Burris!]

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

I don't think I've ever written a blog post that explains how I develop formats and protocols, probably because I was afraid of getting flamed. Nowadays I'm not so afraid, so here's how I do it.

1. First, I have to understand the problem. That might take a month or more of walking around Berkeley or New York listening to music and podcasts. When I finally feel I grok it enough to begin coding, I need to have at least two apps. One that produces the format and one that consumes it. So I start by writing very simple versions of those apps and usually run them on the same machine to make debugging easier.

2. I connect them with a protocol that I know won't be the one I will use, but models it in some fashion. In the app I'm working on now, I had the server wait a random amount of time before returning the name of one of the 50 states chosen at random. On the client side, I have it open a connection to the server and wait until it gets an answer, which it just records in the database.

3. Once I have the two apps conversing this way, I start to make the conversation meaningful. I take my time, really slow down and think, try out lots of approaches. I also do a lot of prior art searches to see if I can pick up ideas from people who came before. In this case, I looked at FriendFeed's realtime API, but I came up with something that's a bit simpler. It could be that the previous protocol can do more than mine, but I just wanted to flow updates across firewalls and NATs. (Even so, my protocol has a lot of room for growth.)

4. Once I've settled on the format, and this could take a few days, I then split the apps between a real server and client and start to test it doing the work it was intended to do. Since I haven't done that yet, I can't tell you how it will go. I might loop back to step 3 and change the format based on what I've learned. I will certainly add logging features and metadata to the payload to enable debugging and performance monitoring.

5. Once I'm satisfied that it works, I write an informal document for discussion and review. I don't sneak a look to friends or people I like. If I did, that would violate the very important principle of keeping the playing field level. Instead I'll post the document publicly and post pointers in various places, on the rssCloud mail list, on Twitter, probably on the Frontier-Kernel list since I'm trying to reactivate that community after a long period of staying out of it.

Now some people say this isn't an open process, but in developing technology there has to be a time for thinking. We can't mind-meld like Vulcans. I require solitary thinking time to figure stuff out. So while people have a chance to spot problems in my proposed formats and protocols, there really isn't much room to argue over the minute details. There are always two or more ways to do something. Instead of calling a packet a <packet> I could call it a <blob> but what difference would that make?

I have participated in the working group style of format definition, what I called the "deliberative approach" in yesterday's piece. But I don't like the results that come from that. I believe in designing these bits of tech as much as Jonathan Ive would design a new iPod or BMW would design a driving machine. To me this is an art, and in art there are always choices, and someone has to make them.

The deliberative process is all about not making choices, putting all the possible ways of doing something in the spec. This gives an ego boost to the people on the working group, and a lot of grief to the engineers who have to deploy. In the end you have multiple profiles and lots of missed opportunities for interop. Having one person act as designer may hurt some egos, but the format works better in the real world.

An anonymous reader writes "Following Sun Microsystems' decision to release a raft of open source applications to support its secure cloud computing strategy, companies may be wondering if they should conduct security tests of their customized open source software before deployment. While the use of encryption and VPNs to extend a secure bridge between a company IT resource and a private cloud facility is very positive — especially now that Amazon is beta testing its pay-as-you-go private cloud facility — it's important that the underlying application code is also secure. What do you think?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via Jay Rose we learn of the absolutely bizarre story of how a Washington Post editor witnessed an altercation involving an off-duty police officer who pulled his gun on people in a snowball fight -- and the eventual Washington Post writeup on the story which completely ignored the eyewitness account of its editor in favor of the claim by the police that the gun wasn't drawn. Yes, a Washington Post editor happened to have been on the scene and witnessed the whole thing. He called it in and told a reporter about it -- but the reporter simply ignored the editor's account. As Jay Rosen notes: "Who you gonna believe? The police department or your own staffer's lying eyes?" Even worse, by the time the Washington Post put out its report, there was already photographic evidence of the drawn gun posted online, along with a video where the cop admits to pulling the gun.

Later on, the Washington Post did "update" its report, mentioning the online evidence, but waited for quite some time before finally linking to the video (and never linked to the photos). As the Washington City Paper notes about this, it's in part due to very old school media thinking:

Yet the reason why the Post screwed this up is that they all have linkophobia. If you link to an outlet---such as, God forbid, the Washington City Paper---you've lost. You got scooped and all your colleagues are going to look down on you. Linking is a huge sign of weakness---you just can't do it. Far better to, like, call a top police official, buy his version of events, and just place it in a post, regardless of the contradicting evidence that's already posted elsewhere.

Take a close look at that 10:20 update on the maybe-gun-pulling cop: "The plainclothes D.C. police detective may have unholstered his pistol during the confrontation with participants in the huge snowball fight, based on video and photos posted on the Internet."

Bold and italics are mine. They're mine because this is the most cowardly, selfish, arrogant news conduct out there today. What the fuck is "video and photos posted on the Internet"? How does that help readers? It's as if I can go to www.internet.com, and there, on the first screen, will be the video and photos of the snowball fight and the maybe-gun-wielding cop. "Posted on the Internet" would be acceptable if this were 1997.

The reporters used this hazy phrasing because they were too chicken-shit to do something that we all have learned to do over the past, say, decade or more. And that's to link to competitors and acknowledge their contributions to stories.

Remember, this is the Washington Post, that recently had a column claiming that a blog linking to a Washington Post story (multiple times) had ripped off the Washington Post. So, perhaps that explains why the Washington Post refused to link to others who had more accurate takes on the story. It didn't want to "rip them off," and preferred to get the story wrong, even though it employed an eye witness.

So where are all those reporters who insist that the professional press is needed because they get this stuff right, while it's the upstarts that rush to post false claims?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Google's sponsoring free wifi this holiday season at 54 airports in the states, through January 15th. Some airports already had free wifi (Phoenix and Seattle recently for me, keep on doin' it right, guys!), but for those that didn't, this promises to take the sting out of that snowy delay or congested terminal. My RSS reader would sing carols if JFK were on that list!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

sopssa writes "Several sites, including TechCrunch and The Register, are reporting about an email Google's VP Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. 'At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyone's benefit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems that the Italian legal system really has problems with YouTube. We've already detailed the absolutely ridiculous criminal lawsuit against Google execs over a video of some kids taunting another kid (why Google execs are criminally responsible for this still remains unexplained). Then there's the Italian politician who has tried to sue a bunch of YouTube commenters. And now comes the news (via Michael Scott) that a court has ordered YouTube to remove all content from Mediaset, an Italian broadcaster owned (of course) by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. It's unclear how the court thinks YouTube can somehow figure out what content is from Mediaset, but it doesn't appear that Italian law cares about such practicalities.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Eversion in air: from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a duck penis. Science blogger Ed Yong has a great article up today about these freaky, corkscrew behemoths and the equally freaky, labyrinthine duck vaginas. A researcher from Yale has been studying both, and thinks these rather baroque naughty bits evolved in competition with one another, as female ducks tried to evade rape (or, rather, impregnation by a rapist) and male ducks tried to get around those barriers.

The shape of the female duck's vagina is a physical barrier that prevents the male from launching forth his ballistic penis to its fullest extent. It won't stop a drake from ejaculating (and those in Brennan's trials always did), but it does limit how far the semen is deposited along the vaginal tract. Not all males are hit equally hard by these defences. Those that the female actually wants to mate with have an easier time. If she's into a male, she strikes a pose that signals her receptiveness, keeping her body level and lifting her tail feathers high. She repeatedly contracts the walls of her genital tract, relaxing them for long enough for favoured suitors to achieve full penetration.

Males who try to force themselves upon her receive no such help and have to cope with vigorous struggling. The female may not be able to resist such advances, but her convoluted vagina gives her ultimate control over where the sperm of her current partner ends up. The fact that only 3% of duck offspring are born of forced matings suggests that females are indeed winning this battle of the sexes.

Not Exactly Rocket Science: Ballistic Penises and Corkscrew Vaginas (There's more video!)

From the MAKE Flickr pool Paul Edward Carson's welded basketball-sized D12 looks like it'd be perfect for rolling the next big Space Marine skirmish! He explains a key advantage of owning such an item -

If i need to generate a random number between 1 and 12 while destroying my house, i have just the thing.

That you do, Paul - anyone for RPG bowling?! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

BuzzSkyline writes "Researchers in Belgium have developed devices to harvest the waste heat our bodies throw off in order to convert it to electricity to run devices such as a wristband blood oxygen sensor and an electrocardiogram shirt. As a side benefit, the power sources help cool you down and keep you looking cool, all while running sundry micropower devices. In fact, the researchers mention that the energy harvesting head band works so well that it can get uncomfortably cold. In that case, they say, 'This problem is solved in exactly the same way as someone solves it on the body level in cold weather: a headgear should be worn on top of the system to limit the heat flow and make it comfortable.' But it would be such a shame to cover up the golden heat-harvesting headband with a hat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For a little while now, Broadband Reports has been doing a good job highlighting how Verizon Wireless has been charging a phantom $1.99 fee for "accessing the internet" even when users claim they did no such thing. Despite a growing amount of press coverage, Verizon Wireless had been silent on the issue. However, once David Pogue at the NY Times reported on it, finally the FCC got involved and asked Verizon Wireless to explain. The company apparently delayed for a while and then sent a reply (pdf). While much of the press coverage focused on a separate question (about why Verizon Wireless had doubled its early termination fees), what may be more interesting is the company's non-response to the phantom $1.99. It basically said it doesn't do what lots and lots of people are saying it does. David Pogue noticed how odd this is and why Verizon Wireless is not being upfront:

How about the 400 people who chimed in to say, "Me too!" in the comments of my original post? Are they all idiots? How about me? I found several of those $1.99 charges on my own bills. How about the Verizon whistleblower who has begged his managers to change this greedy scheme, and been told to shut up? Is he mistaken?

Even more amusing is that Pogue contacted the Verizon Wireless PR person who had initially scolded him for not getting a comment from the company for his original story:

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us," he said. "I'm not able to comment further."

"But you're saying that you don't charge that $1.99 fee!" I told him. "Yet it's happened to hundreds of my readers, and it's happened to me. So what are we missing?"

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us."

"But it just says Verizon isn't doing it!"

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us."

Comforting, right? It amazes me that companies actually think this sort of approach makes sense, when it's almost guaranteed that the details will eventually come out.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

TheHappyMailAdmin writes "BlackBerry service in North America is out: no email, no BB Messenger and no web browsing. Last carrier estimate I got was 24 hours until service will be restored, with others saying they've gotten estimates from support from between 3 hours to 2 days. BES and BIS services are impacted, and it's across all carriers. Bad timing for RIM as people are wrapping up their holiday shopping..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "Comcast has settled out of court to the tune of $16 million in one of several ongoing P2P throttling class action lawsuits. You may be eligible for up to $16 restitution if 'you live in the United States or its Territories, have a current or former Comcast High-Speed Internet account, and either used or attempted to use Comcast service to use the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols at any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008; and/or Lotus Notes to send emails any time from March 26, 2007 to October 3, 2007.' $16 million seems low. And it's too bad this was an out-of-court settlement instead of a solid precedent-setting decision for your right to use P2P applications. The settlement will probably not affect the slews of other Comcast P2P throttling suits, and it's unclear whether it will placate the FCC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Goldman has the details on a case involving Fair Isaac and its (failed) attempt to claim a trademark on the infamous credit scores it offers. Obviously, you can't just trademark numbers, but Fair Isaac tried to make the case that the scale it uses for your credit rating scores, 300-850, is protectable. The jury tossed that out, and the judge summarized:

"the jury returned a verdict finding that the alleged '300-850' mark was not a valid, protectable trademark because the term '300-850”'has not acquired secondary meaning."

Separately, in the meat of the case, the court rejected claims by Fair Isaac that Experian and Trans Union infringed on its trademarks with their Google AdWords advertising, noting that (beyond the fact that 300-850 isn't trademarkable), there was no confusion on the part of consumers who saw the ads. Fair Isaac had offered up an "expert" witness to claim otherwise, but the court simply said that the expert "lacks credibility."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that the proprietary document format used by the Amazon online store and Amazon's Kindle has been successfully reverse engineered, allowing these DRM-protected documents to be converted into the open MOBI format. Users of alternative e-book readers rejoice." Here are the hacker's notes on the program he is calling "Unswindle," and here is the (translated) forum where the Kindle challenge was posed and answered.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BEARINGS GLOCKEN II is a robotic glockenspiel created by KAWASE Kohske. Check out the link for a lot more videos and pictures.

I paid particular attention to the following two points: First, I focused on the fact that "science and technology" and "artistic expression" have always developed hand in hand. Leonardo de Vinci, who invented principle of bearings, shows this clearly. The other point is realizing "live sound" through performance. We have fewer and fewer chances to experience "live performance." These days we can even listen to music on mobile phones. But, I want people to know the richness, power, impact, and vividness of "sound created right before your eyes."

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

In the past, we've see some ridiculous defamation lawsuits filed in Canada, because (unlike the US), Canada's defamation laws don't have free speech protections included in them. Luckily, the Canadian Supreme Court has seen it reasonable to clarify Canada's defamation laws by detailing a "responsible communication" defense, which allows any publisher (beyond just newspapers) to present a claim that they published the material responsibly, given the situation at hand. It's nice to see various countries realize that draconian defamation laws may present a serious chilling effect on speech.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Blinkybugs are here! These little electro-mechanical insects respond to movement, wind, and vibrations by blinking their LED eyes. Blinkybugs are fun for all ages...and addicting too!

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

eldavojohn writes "Greg Niland is blogging about target.com's aggressive near-spam search engine optimization, and is more than a little critical not only of how this affects the most popular search engine, but also why it will probably persist. If you want an example, search for 'Exercise Bike Clearance' and click the first link."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "Greg Niland is blogging about target.com's aggressive near-spam search engine optimization, and is more than a little critical not only of how this affects the most popular search engine, but also why it will probably persist. If you want an example, search for 'Exercise Bike Clearance' and click the first link."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tor.com's got a new Charlie Stross "Laundry" story, part of his series of stories wherein Cthulhu meets James Bond, as part of its Cthulhu month -- there's also a podcast of the story!

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

I broke the rule this year, and now I'm paying the price. It's not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time--I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: "You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it" said the memo from HR when I complained. They're quite right, and I've made a note to book in advance next time I'm about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

I briefly considered pulling an extended sickie, but Brenda from Admin has a heart of gold; she pointed out that if I volunteered as Night Duty Officer over the seasonal period I could not only claim triple pay and time off in lieu, I'd also be working three grades above my assigned role. For purposes of gaining experience points in the fast-track promotion game they've steering me onto, that's hard to beat. So here I am, in the office on Christmas Eve, playing bureaucratic Pokémon as the chilly rain drums on the roof.

Overtime

Podcast MP3

Tech writing superstar David Pogue writes about his experiment with DRM-free ebook publishing. He concludes that even though his DRM-free book was pirated all over the net, the sales were as high as he expected them to be, based on his previous books' sales. Pogue goes on to talk about what he's learned here -- that DRM-free isn't necessarily bad for sales -- and invites other publishers to try it out. One thing he badly misses, though, is the technical failure of DRM to prevent piracy. Pogue's previous, DRM-crippled ebooks were also pirated, after all, because DRM isn't hard to break (ebooks are vulnerable to a particularly fiendish technical attack called "re-typing"). So when Pogue puts DRM on his books, he only locks down the readers who are honest enough to pay for his stuff in the first place. The people who cheat and download without paying get the copies that the DRM has been removed from.

My publisher, O'Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected PDF file.

After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year's sales.

The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It's all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.

The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.

That's not a perfect, all-variables-equal experiment, of course; any number of factors could explain the results. But for sure, it wasn't the disaster I'd feared.

Should e-Books Be Copy Protected? (Thanks, Hugh!)

theodp writes "Before leaving a long IBM career last summer to head the USPTO, David Kappos managed Big Blue's patent and trademark portfolios. Last Tuesday, the USPTO awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,630,915 to IBM for its inventive method of Managing an Intellectual Property Portfolio."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Shown above is actually an (absurdly overpriced) mat available from Branch, but designer Inghua Ting also makes permanent-install tiles based on the same idea. Clever idea, but will it really hold up over the years? Would be an easy remake. [via Dornob]

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

roju writes "The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian Supreme Court has created a new defense against claims of defamation, allowing for reporting in the public interest. They specifically included bloggers as eligible, writing: '...the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists. These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.' and 'A review of recent defamation case law suggests that many actions now concern blog postings and other online media which are potentially both more ephemeral and more ubiquitous than traditional print media. ... [I]t is more accurate to refer to the new defense as responsible communication on matters of public interest.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tito Jankowski, who works on DNA research tools in his garage, started the San Francisco chapter of DIYbio.

Over the weekend, the SF Chronicle ran a piece on biohacking, with some of the usual suspects (DIYbio, Drew Endy, Tito Jankowski) and raising some of the thornier issues involved in high-tech kitchen-table science.

In a kitchen in Saratoga, an electrical engineer is working with pure strains of E. coli purchased over the Internet in hopes of creating a handheld diagnostic tool to detect dangerous bacteria.

Out of a garage in Sacramento, a bioengineer is designing low-cost equipment to allow people to see and construct DNA.

From a studio in San Francisco, an artist is building houses from a medicinal fungus.

Across the Bay Area, and in other high-tech hotbeds, a revolution is under way. Citizen scientists - or biohackers, as they're being called - are taking biology out of academia and closed-door laboratories and bringing it into garages and kitchens, studios and warehouses.

Above image by Adam Lau for the Chronicle.

Do-it-yourself biology grows with technology

More:
Check out our own citizen science efforts in the Make: Science Room

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

Wow! Very interesting and newsworthy! Amazon's Kindle DRM cracked @ The Register...

An Israeli hacker says he has broken copyright protections built in to Amazon's Kindle for PC, a feat that allows ebooks stored on the application to work with other devices. The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in Amazon's proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did just that. The hack is the latest to show the futility of digital rights management schemes, which more often than not inconvenience paying customers more than they prevent unauthorized copying.

Unswindle code is available here if you want to check it out...

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

Google's Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a paean to 'open,' in which his company's commitment to 'open' is pitched at great length. The most remarkable paragraph, however, is the one dealing with things that Google keeps closed:

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

How odd that of all the products Google would be forced to keep proprietary by its commitment to an open internet, it just happens to be the ones that make it all of its money.

I still can't comprehend arguments in favor of allowing copyrights on facts. However, over in Europe they do allow copyrighting of facts if they're in a database, using so-called database rights. Of course, there's a big problem with such things. Contrary to the claim that database rights encourage a bigger database industry, the evidence (just like copyright and patents) points out that the opposite is true. And yet, Europe keeps believing in database rights. techflaws.org points us to a recent High Court ruling in Germany claiming that TV listings are covered by copyright and thus websites that display the factual information of what the TV schedule is have to pay up. In other words, it's going to become harder to find out what time shows are on TV, meaning that fewer people will watch TV. How does this help anyone?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The ITP winter show 2009 (a two day exhibition of interactive projects, sound and physical computing at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program Tisch School of the Arts) is always a joy to visit (see our coverage from earlier in the week). Each year we visit the show and try to pick out a few favorites, it's always a challenge since there are usually quite a bit. That said, here are five interesting projects from this year's show. The video above will give you a quick taste of what the show is all about too! And here are a bunch of photos.

---

fridgebuzzz MK1 - Guitar inspired MIDI controller consisting of 32 LED pushbuttons and 6 touch plate switches. The MK1 prototype is a user programmable MIDI controller featuring 32 LED pushbutton switches and 6 touch sensitive copper plate switches. An example user mapping would have the top row of twelve buttons be designated as major chords arranged in the cirle of fifths. The row below has minor chords arranged as the relative minor to the major chords. The touch sensitive switches, arranged as if they were strings on a guitar, trigger notes based on which chord button is pressed. The eight buttons located higher on the neck play a major or minor scale in the key of the last chord button that was pressed. The headstock contains six LEDs that flash when the corresponding touch plate is activated. Paul Rothman.

---

The Bed. A physical visualization of conflicts. The machine reads daily data from news organizations, and detects conflicts using semantics. The location of the news is then translated from Latitude Longitude to xy, and the plotters head drips paint on the translated location. Igal Nassima.

---

Dynamic Ground. Step on the platform and see how the units below your feet magically come to life... The Dynamic Ground is a responsive, kinetic floor constructed from deployable units. When passersby step on the platform, the tiles shift between a contracted state to an expanded state. Each unit is constructed from 7 interconnected hexagons that move in a continues circular movement, driven by one central servo motor, which is activated by a light sensor. Adam Lassy, Adi Marom.

---

Historical Radio. A radio which moves the listener through time and space. The historical radio uses a familiar interface to navigate through historical radio broadcasts from multiple genres of music and news. The tracks are curated to provide an educational experience, highlighting events across time (move through time) or across the world and genres at the same time (move through space). This device would fit in at a history museum, and is designed to be understandable and usable by anone who has ever used a radio: turn the tuning knob to move through time, turn the band selector switch to move through space. By selecting an automatic mode, the curation will take the listener along a path across time or space. David MIller, Jason Aston, Lucas Werthein.

---

Super Duper Cubes. A tangible interface to control music and video through midi, using a set of illuminated cubes. Super Duber Cubes are a tangible interface built to control music, games or visualizations. Each cube has a 3-axis gyroscope, a 3-axis accelerometer, plus wireless communication and built-in battery. This allows the user to turn and rotate the cubes without any wires attached. In one setup the user can change musical instruments by turning the left cube. By turning the right cube, the user can select between several parameters in the selected instrument. By rotating the left cube, the user can manipulate these parameters, e.g. turning down the volume, applying distortion or adding delay to the instrument. Nikolas Psaroudakis, Rune Madsen.

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

An anonymous reader writes "Joanna Rutkowska's company Invisible Things Lab has issued the results of their research into flaws in Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), whose function is to provide a mechanism for safe loading of system software and to protect sensitive files. ITL describes how flaws in TXT can be used to compromise the integrity of a software loaded via an Intel TXT-based loader in a generic way, fully circumventing any protection TXT is supposed to provide. The attack exploits an implementation error in the so-called SINIT Authenticated Code modules and that could potentially allow a malicious attacker to elevate their privileges. Intel has released a patch for the affected chipsets, which include the Q35, GM45, PM45 Express, Q45, and Q43 Express." Here are ITL's press release and Intel's advisory (both PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forbes on another tablet: "The $75 Tablet Computer." You'll never guess who!

One fine morning, Jimmie Rogers woke up and decided to figure out how many Charlieplexed LEDs would fit on an Arduino shield. After five hours and some hardcore design and layout action, he determined that the answer is 126. It's a pretty complex looking board, however he has excellent explanations of the design process and subsequent software development on his blog. The board is a work in progress, but it's looking great so far!

In the Maker Shed:

Atari Punk Console Kit

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

It seems like the old telegraph system is suddenly getting lots of new attention. A few weeks back, we wrote about some lessons from the old telegraph system that could be enlightening in the net neutrality debate. And, now, James Gattuso points us to a fun read over at The Economist about how people freaked out that the telegraph was going to kill newspapers. There was concern about how this device would lead to destroying quality reporting, getting people to focus more on the quick hits, and that there would be less reason to do "real" reporting -- leading to more annoying opinion writing, rather than actual journalism. Sound familiar? Of course, it didn't work out that way:

What lessons does the telegraph hold for newspapers now grappling with the internet? The telegraph was first seen as a threat to papers, but was then co-opted and turned to their advantage. "The telegraph helped contribute to the emergence of the modern newspaper," says Ford Risley, head of the journalism department at Penn State University. "People began to expect the latest news, and a newspaper could not succeed if it was not timely."

Today, papers are doing their best to co-opt the internet. They have launched online editions, set up blogs and encouraged dialogue with readers. Like the telegraph, the internet has changed the style of reporting and forced papers to be more timely and accurate, and politicians to be more consistent. Again there is talk of news being commoditised and of the need to focus on analysis and opinion, or on a narrow subject area. And again there are predictions of the death of the newspaper, with hand-wringing about the implications for democracy if fewer publications exist to challenge those in authority or expose wrongdoing.

The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better. The telegraph hastened the speed at which news was disseminated. So does the internet. Those in the news business use the new technology at every stage of newsgathering and distribution. A move to electronic distribution--through PCs, mobile phones and e-readers--has started. It seems likely only to accelerate.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Hemos recommends the coverage over at Wired of a project to digitize nuclear reactor art. "Not all nuclear reactors are built alike. Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants, and configurations, a fact beautifully illustrated by a series of reactor wall charts originally published in issues of Nuclear Engineering International during the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the charts have been lovingly collected by Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer at Sandia National Laboratory. Recently, he completed his collection... and began to digitize the drawings. The first eight out of more than 100 have now been permanently archived online... 'This is not a CAD/CAM-type thing,' Knief said. 'This really is art.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For nearly all of the history of copyright law, the law itself has been designed by and for a certain group of middlemen -- even as it was officially supposed to be about creating incentives for the creation of new, quality content. For this reason, copyright law has changed radically over the past three centuries, as those middlemen repeatedly strove to ratchet up and increase their monopoly rents. However, with the introduction of the internet and the personal computer, something unfortunate happened to the middlemen. They discovered that suddenly this cozy process of middlemen and politicians constantly ratcheting up monopoly protections ran into a bit of a speedbump: that ratcheting up interfered with the daily lives of millions of people online.

Because of that, over the past few years, a growing group of people have become increasingly vocal, in pointing out that the true purpose of copyright law should be to make sure it actually does increase the incentives for the creation of new works, rather than taking it on faith (and the sworn word of the middlemen). This has upset the middlemen greatly -- for historically they faced little to no opposition to their ongoing efforts to continually increase the monopoly rights granted to them.

Now facing serious opposition to these efforts for the first time, it appears that some of those involved in the cozy process of constantly ratcheting up copyright law (in one direction only) have decided that rather than present evidence as to why this is actually needed, they will simply break out two favorite mechanisms of the copyright maximalist arsenal: scream about "international obligations" over and over again... and when that fails, start the name calling.

Both are evident in an angry rant from Dr. Mihaly Ficsor, the President of the Hungarian Copyright Experts Council, and a former Assistant Director General of WIPO (i.e., the "old boys club" of folks who ratchet up copyright at every turn possible, based on faith alone, but not evidence of its need). Dr. Ficsor is particularly peeved at Michael Geist, for pushing back on the demands of other countries to radically change Canada's copyright laws. Dr. Fiscor's rant was posted to the blog of Barry Sookman, a Canadian copyright lawyer and lobbyist for the recording industry who has been a strong defender of secretive processes like ACTA negotiations and other attempts to change Canadian copyright laws on the whims of foreign middlemen, rather than any evidence of necessity.

I had thought that perhaps Dr. Ficsor's response would raise substantive issues concerning changes to copyright law, or perhaps (and this would be wonderful) present the actual evidence of why such changes are necessary. Tragically, there is none of that. It is blind faith-based pronouncements instead -- insisting that it's necessary because it's necessary, and then falling back on the mantra of "international obligations" for pretty much every other issue. Even on the one claim that he makes which he insists is substantive (that, despite not clearly saying so, these treaties do in fact require anti-circumvention clauses), he seems to purposely misrepresent history, pretending that he didn't lose this battle over a decade ago already.

At the end, it moves on to the pure insult phase:

I am sure that the policy makers of Canada do not allow being misled and frightened by the noisy group of these "free-access" "revolutionaries" (I hope so since, here in the former "socialist" countries of Central and Eastern Europe, we have had quite bad experience of certain "free access" "revolutionary" collectivist systems constrained on us for several decades). I am sure that they will not let Canada to become an isolated hostage and victim of demagogue campaigns organized in the hatred-driven style of Maoist Guards as during that other brilliant "cultural revolution."

Now, if you're at all familiar with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, to compare that to those who are simply pushing for their own consumer rights on copyright issues or asking for actual evidence of the need for increasingly draconian copyright system changes, is downright ridiculous and insulting. No one is acting as a revolutionary, demanding "free access" or any sort of "Maoist" revolution. To make such a claim is pure ignorance. While some may disagree with the position Geist and others have taken, they have presented a position based on consumer and individual rights and an understanding of basic legal principles and economics. You can disagree with the conclusions, but to mischaracterize them in such a ridiculous manner raises all sorts of questions about what the copyright "old guard" has to hide. If they cannot respond to basic questions with actual evidence or actual answers, and instead resort to name calling like Dr. Ficsor does above, it seems only reasonable to conclude that there is no evidence to support their position. And when hundreds of thousands of Canadians spoke up to point out the emperor has no clothes, perhaps it's not surprising that the emperor would lash out in anger, but it simply demonstrates how the "faith-based" nature of those pushing for ever more stringent copyright laws means that they cannot engage in reasoned debate on a position that has no reason behind it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I love these hand-screened MakerBot T's, done by 1AEON. Want.

MakerBot 1AEON T-Shirt

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

This special F/X-laden five-minute robot invasion flick is about giant robots "coming to destroy my small city. I think maybe it's an attempt to make the city look bigger and more important... :-)," says the director, Fede Alvarez. About the production, Fede says:

It took US$300 to shoot the live action, and then maybe a year to complete the 90 vfx shots (during very interrupted periods...) I used Premiere, After, Photoshop, 3dMax, Boujou, Glu3d, and FumeFx. The modeling, mapping and rigging of the Robots, fighters and planes was made by Mauro Rondan.

[via Kent Barnes' Twitter feed]

Panic Atack! / Small Movie, Big Robots

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