Dan made an AVR-based logging wattmeter... He writes -

This device monitors household power usage and logs it to an SD card. A simple analog front-end amplifies the signals from voltage and current detectors and an ATmega168 microcontroller computes the power consumption using the formula P=V*I. The voltage and current are each sampled at 9615 Hz so the integration should be fairly accurate even for highly non-sinusoidal loads such as computers or fluorescent bulbs. A graphical LCD shows the power usage as a strip chart and can also act as an oscilloscope to display the voltage and current waveforms. The current is amplified in three stages (1x, 10x, and 100x) so that different gains can be used giving accurate readings for both high and low power usage.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Reader RoundSparrow sends word of a contest, with big cash prizes, being mounted by a commercial vender of open source Open-WRT routers. You have 10 months to come up with "the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti's newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation." Entries are required to have open source licensing and will all be released. First prize is $160,000, with four runners-up receiving $10,000. RoundSparrow adds: "Could be built on top of existing X-WRT or LuCI OpenWRT web interfaces. OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09 was just released. Now is perfect timing for OpenWRT to get some kick-ass interface and usability ideas. I'm not affiliated with the contest vendor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Design it, build it, test it, fly it
In your classroom, students may be working with concepts like aerodynamics and the Design Process. Many kids use the CO2 dragster as a way of exploring these ideas. In MAKE: Volume 15 and MAKE: Volume 16, we have a couple of projects that can really help students turn on their minds while they get their hands on tools that enable them to work with the concepts of both planning a design and revising it based on testing as well as really seeing the affect of various custom made shapes on the fluid flowing over the form.

Designing and building in three dimensions
Designing a model on paper is one thing, but when you can hold it in your hand, everything seems clearer. A great quick way to make your own three dimensional shapes is the 5-Minute Foam Factory
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol16/?pg=118 You can find detailed build instructions on how to build your own hot wire foam cutter on pages 116-120 of your print or digital edition of MAKE: Volume 16.

Once you have the cutter built, you can test out your designs.The promises of the online version of Make really comes out with the styrofoam cutter. There are loads of neat techniques in the online version of the project. Online, there are techniques that either didn't fit or were not developed in time for the print edition. There are some useful comments offering suggestions around materials and safety.

Keep it Safe
On safety with this project, there are a few things to keep in mind while working with kids: Toxic fumes and Fire. You will need to work out a way to deal with these. Using the foam cutter near a window and venting it to the outside might just be enough. As far as fire, supervision is the key, and making sure that every student is clear about the expectations of keeping themselves and their classmates safe. Having a reasonably sized fire extinguisher handy seems like a prudent safety measure with this project. If you still have questions or concerns, check with your local fire department and see what they have for suggestions.

Make your wind tunnel - http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol15/?pg=148
http://makezine.com/15/diyhome_wind/

Your wind tunnel could be made from lots of different materials. Many schools have at least a few paper boxes kicking around, which could provide some structure for the tunnel. Coroplast folds nice and tapes to close. Concrete footing tube would give you a round shape for the tunnel. A window fan could pull the air through, or you could even raid some out of some computer power supplies. For the straws you will need, you could raid the cafeteria or a burger joint for some drinking straws, though you should probably ask before cleaning out the straw bin.

What will your students learn and do?
Your wind tunnel and foam cutter help you to have students make a design based on the aerodynamics principles you specify, and then test the various designs they come up with, providing real data on their design choices. By trying several designs as individuals or as a group, students can start to see and visualize the shapes and surfaces that lend towards less drag and more lift. They can then start to recognize aerodynamic forms in the engineered world around them and understand why things look and function as they do.

Finding out more
Here are some resources from TeachEngineering on the subject of Aerodynamics.

If you are looking for lots of resources on teaching Engineering, Celeste Baine has a great collection of the top 10 List of K-12 Engineering Education Programs. Design Squad has a resource page for educators with lots of printable materials for classroom use.

While we are on the topic of aerodynamics, a look at Airplanes from How Stuff Works might come in handy. You might also find some ideas at Instructables on aerodynamics based projects.

What do you think?
Have you built the 5 Minute Foam Factory? Have you built the Model Wind Tunnel? What have you done with these projects on your own? What are the best resources you have found for teaching the Design Process in your classroom? What techniques help your students to stick with multiple versions of sketch models, appearance models and prototypes as they home in on a final design? What is the best way to get kids excited about aerodynamics, lift, drag and fluid friction? How can you help your students to visualize the effects of various shapes and surfaces on a design they are about to build? What are some other ways you could or have used these projects in your classroom? Join us in the conversation in the comments, and add your pictures and videos to the Make Flickr pool.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Peace Corps Online writes "In the 1980s a deadly fungus called chytrid appeared in Central America and began moving through mountain streams, killing as many as 8 out of 10 frogs and extinguishing some species entirely. (The fungus has little effect on any other vertebrates.) Now a returned Peace Corps volunteer and her husband have opened the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in western Panama to house more than 600 frogs as chytrid cuts a lethal path through the region. Experts agree that the only hope of saving some of the more endangered, restricted-range species is to collect animals from remaining wild populations, establish captive breeding programs, and be prepared to conduct reintroduction projects in the future. But before reintroduction can even begin, scientists must find some way to overcome the chytrid in native habitats using vaccines, breeding for resistance, or genetic engineering of the fungus. Conservationists are budgeting for 25 years of captive breeding, long enough, they believe, to allow some response to chytrid to be found. 'There are more species in need of rescue than there are resources to rescue them,' says Amphibian Ark's program director. 'When you're talking about insidious threats like disease or climate change, threats that can't be mitigated in the wild, there's simply no alternative.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

oliphaunt writes "This week at The Legality, Tracy Frazier has an article discussing the damage that can be done by anonymous online comments. While regulars here are familiar with infamous bits of Net censorship like the Fishman Affidavit fiasco, and everyone has been an anonymous coward at least once or twice, some of you may not know about the conflict between Heide Iravani and AutoAdmit.com. Heide eventually filed a lawsuit because the first result for a Google search on her name brought up anonymous comments on AutoAdmit that accused her of carrying an STD and sleeping her way to the top of her class. The Communications Decency Act was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, but an injunction prevented it from ever being enforced and eventually the Supreme Court killed it. Should the law be changed?" The article links to a proposal from last summer in the New Jersey legislature that would institute a DMCA-like takedown regime for allegedly defamatory content posted on a Web site, and would allow aggrieved parties to demand the identity of anonymous posters without a subpoena. No indication of how that proposal fared. Also linked is a recent North Carolina proposal that would criminalize the act of defaming someone using an electronic medium. This proposal shields Web sites from liability and explicitly does not apply to anonymous speech.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The thought never occurred to me: scratch-building your own turntable. Paulo Rebordao writes:

This is a record player complete with a servo controlled arm that I've designed and built during the last 10 months. It has a few unusual features and I think it looks Way Cool!!!

Besides some general info on the workings, I also made available the schematics and software for downloading.

The Turntable

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

I love these literal versions of 80s music videos. Here's one for Billy Idol's "White Wedding."

UPDATE: I like the literal version of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Under the Bridge" even more. (Thanks, Antinous!)

Huh - this is really interesting, an "app store" from Liquidware....

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

Buzz has been building for the last week about what might be a new data breach at a credit-card processor. No, not Heartland, a different one. Now Computerworld is reporting that Visa claims there was no new breach. Whom to believe? "In actuality, Visa said in a statement issued today, alerts that it recently sent to banks and credit unions warning them about a compromise at a payment processor were related to the ongoing investigation of a previously known breach. However, Visa still didn't disclose the identity of the breached company, nor did it say why it is continuing to keep the name under wraps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reports on a proceeding being held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regarding net neutrality. They requested comments from the public as part of the debate, and several Canadian ISPs took the opportunity to explain why they think it's a bad idea. Quoting: "One of the more interesting responses came from an ISP called Videotron, which told the CRTC that controlling access to content ... 'could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.' As examples of such benefits, Videotron mentioned the control of spam, viruses, and child pornography. It went on to suggest that graduated response rules — kicking users off the 'Net after several accusations of copyright infringement — could also be included as a benefit to society in general. ... Rogers, one of Canada's big ISPs, also chimed in and explained that new regulations might limit its ability to throttle P2P uploads, which it does at the moment. 'P2P file sharing is designed to cause network congestion,' says the company. 'It contributes significantly to latency, thereby making the network unreliable for certain users at periods of such congestion.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

magacious writes "Friday marked a year to the day since Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008, but did it have quite the impact the so-called software giant expected, or did it make more of a little squeak than a big bang? Before its arrival on 27 February 2008, it had been five long years since the release of the last major version of Windows Server. In a world that was moving on from simple client/server applications, and with server clouds on the horizon, Windows Server 2003 was looking long in the tooth. After a year of 'Vista' bashing, Microsoft needed its server project to be well received, just to relieve some pressure. After all, this time last year, the panacea of a well-received Windows 7 was still a long way off. So came the new approach: Windows Server 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's long-running war against Patti Santangelo, her children, and even her children's schoolmates has been 'settled in principle,' with final settlement documents expected to be submitted by March 18th. Patti Santangelo is believed to be the first RIAA defendant to have made a motion to dismiss the RIAA's 'making available' complaint. The case first caught the attention of the Slashdot community back in 2005, when a transcript of Ms. Santangelo's first court appearance became available online. The case attracted national attention in December of 2005. According to the Associated Press report of the settlement, neither side was able to comment on the terms of the settlement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Three months after being awarded $873 million in a lawsuit against Atlantis Blue Capital for violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, Facebook earlier this week filed a federal complaint against 'Spam King' Sanford Wallace in San Jose District Court. Las Vegas night club manager Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw are also named as defendants in the suit." These filings do not mark the first time Wallace has faced legal action; last May, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against him.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is starting to look like an art project...

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

Gov IT writes with this excerpt from NextGov: "Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. ... The basic technology that runs peer-to-peer networks inadvertently exposed the files probably without the computer user's knowledge, Johnson said. A health care worker might have loaded patient files onto a laptop, for example, and taken it home where a son or daughter could have downloaded a peer-to-peer client onto laptop to share music."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yikes, someone made a real "Fly Plane" Spatula writes -

After coming across this lovely image depicting the construction of a fly powered matchstick airplane, I had to try it for myself. Here are the flies, trapped within their impenetrable polyethylene terephthalate dungeon of doom. As difficult as it may be, avoid pouring the hydrochloric acid in with them. They find it very unpleasant, and may refuse to fly for you. Wait until after you get bored with the plane before you decide to bathe them.

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

On Wednesday we discussed news that the Authors Guild had objected to the text-to-speech function on Amazon's Kindle 2, claiming that it infringed on audio book copyright. Today, Amazon said that while the feature is legally sound, they would be willing to disable text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis at the rightsholder's request. "We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meet CCRMA, a group of musical makers who stretch the sonic boundaries by turning personal computers into an electronic symphony. In the Workshop, John Park hacks a Wii controller and turns it into a personal flight recorder that can measure the G forces of roller coasters and other high-speed activities. In the Toolbox segment, William Gurstelle demonstrates the slick, back-cutting action of a super-sharp Japanese saw. The Maker Channel features a tesla coil-powered guitar amp, an RFID reader implanted in a human hand, and LED fan sign to bring to baseball games, and a solar powered bicycle gondola.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, or what in HD on Blip.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Here's the torrent of Episode 9 of Make: television!

Episode 109: Computer Making Music & Personal Flight RecorderMeet CCRMA, a group of musical makers who stretch the sonic boundaries by turning personal computers into an electronic symphony. In the Workshop, John Park hacks a Wii controller and turns it into a personal flight recorder that can measure the G forces of roller coasters and other high-speed activities. In the Toolbox segment, William Gurstelle demonstrates the slick, back-cutting action of a super-sharp Japanese saw. The Maker Channel features a tesla coil-powered guitar amp, an RFID reader implanted in a human hand, and LED fan sign to bring to baseball games, and a solar powered bicycle gondola.

Find PDFs to our projects and a guide to all of the previous episodes at makezine.tv

Make: is available in HD on Public Television, Vimeo, Blip, and YouTube.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Meet CCRMA, a group of musical makers who stretch the sonic boundaries by turning personal computers into an electronic symphony. Based at Stanford University, CCRMA teams composers, artists and acoustical researchers together to meld music with new technology and explore the outer limits of audio from playground-activated sounds to laptop orchestras. Then see the origins of the synthesizer.

Learn more about CCRMA at http://ccrma.stanford.edu/, or visit Chris Warren's website and blog.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, watch on YouTube or Blip.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

John Park hacks a Wii controller and turns it into a personal flight recorder that can sense and measure the stomach-churning G forces of roller coasters and other high-speed, high-risk activities.

Download the PDF for this project.

Download the Personal Flight Recorder program for the Arduino.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, watch on YouTube or Blip.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Make a versatile and rugged personal flight recorder that will record the g-forces during any type of ride or trip. Check out the details for the Personal Flight Recorder that John Park builds in the Maker Workshop, and don't forget to download the Personal Flight Recorder software for the Arduino.

Give this build a shot, and let us know how it turned out. We'd love to hear your feedback or see your pictures! Email us at maketelevision@makezine.com.

Watch the Maker Workshop - Personal Flight Recorder segment.

Or check it out on Vimeo, Blip, or YouTube.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Here's the .zip file for the Personal Flight Recorder project from the Maker Workshop in Episode 9 of Make: television. Check out the PDFfor full instructions on how to build your own Personal Flight Recorder. Share your questions or comments in the comments section below.

Watch the Maker Workshop - Personal Flight Recorder segment.

Or check it out on Vimeo, Blip, or YouTube.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

In this Toolbox segment, William Gurstelle demonstrates the slick, back-cutting action of a super-sharp Japanese saw.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, watch on YouTube or Blip.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Make: television presents:

• Tesla coil guitar - Steve Connor plays his tesla coil guitar amplifier
• RFID implant - Amal Graafstra opens locks and other devices with his hand-implanted RFID tag.
• LED fan sign - Kip Kedersha lights up the baseball bleachers with his homemade sign.
• Solar-powered Gondola - Reno Tondelli takes us on a spin with his Solar Powered Bicycle Gondola.

Submit a video of your own project at makerchannel.org.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, watch on YouTube or Blip.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

So you have a great idea, and you want to share it, but where will you find people to share with? If you can get to the Boston area for the April 18 and 19th 2009 weekend (perhaps you haven't yet scheduled your April Vacation?) then you should definitely check out Boston Skill Share, a community effort to help people get and share great ideas.

The Bosto?n Skill?share? is an annua?l volun?teer-?run,? donat?ion-?based? weeke?nd event? that brings peopl?e toget?her to share? pract?ical skill?s.? It's happe?ning this year on Satur?day and Sunda?y,? April? 18 & 19 at M.?I.?T.? in Cambr?idge.? Every?one is invit?ed.?

Looking for an overview of the weekend? Take a look at the Info page, pretty good place to start. Their Points of Unity, lets you in on their great mindset.

If you would like to lead a workshop, then check out the Workshop Submission Form. Maybe you just want to go and learn loads of cool stuff, so explore the workshop page, which will fill up as the event approaches.

Right? now, we are looki?ng for peopl?e to lead works?hops.? That means? we need YOU to think? of your favor?ite thing? to teach? and sign up now to parti?cipat?e.? Anyon?e can lead a works?hop about? anything!? Past skill?share?s inclu?ded every?thing? from makin?g your own under?wear to bike mecha?nics to yoga.? Help make the world? a more inter?estin?g and skillful place?.
The Bosto?n Skill?share? aims to creat?e a tempo?rary space? for peopl?e to share? pract?ical skills,? which? help us to live happi?ly,? creat?ively? and susta?inabl?y.? The empha?sis is on actio?n over theor?y,? participat?ion over talk.? We want to live with enthu?siasm?,? so let us learn? with vigor?!?

So check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. Have you attended one of the previous
Boston Skill Share events? If you have pictures, please add them to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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

Without polling the server, an expensive operation, there isn't a simple way send a Javascript client frequently updated server data. This is a problem if you want to make a multiuser game or chat application in Javascript. A post on ajaxian proposes a solution: Daniel Prieler's jsSO library, which proxies real time communication between Javascript clients through Flash and an RTMP server:

The data-transfer and the connection to the server are maintained by a simple embedded Flashmovie in your page. The communication with other clients runs through the local Flashmovie and the Red5-Server.

The data-flow between two clients looks like this:

Javascript/jsSO <-> Flashmovie <-> Red5-Server <-> Flashmovie <-> Javascript/jsSO

Red5, by the way, is an open source implementation of Adobe's Flash Server. It can be used to stream or record video, or provide low latency, event-based communication via remote shared objects.

Fast multiplayer Javascript games, here we come.

jsSO - Flash Shared Objects in Javascript [via ajaxian]
Red5

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

Kristina at Science News writes "A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture. After ground-based telescopes found three planets orbiting the young star HR 8799, a team took that information and reprocessed some 11-year-old Hubble Space Telescope images. Voila. There was one of the three planets, captured by Hubble but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light. The technique could reveal hidden treasures in many archived telescope images." For reference, the first exoplanet to be (knowingly) directly imaged was 2M1207_b in late 2004.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sean Williams sez,

Pyr has released my novel The Crooked Letter as a PDF, free to all, without DRM. _The Crooked Letter_ is kinda urban New Weird on a massive scale. It's been compared to China Mieville, Philip Pullman, Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, yada yada, and it won both the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards the year it was released (the first fantasy novel in the history of the awards do so). It's also my attempt to take all the world's religions and wrap them up in a crazy Darwinian package that even a hardcore atheist like me might be tempted to buy.

I'm particularly excited about this because I've been wanting to release my novels on the web for as long as the web has existed, and this is the first time one of my publishers has agreed to do it. If it does well, maybe others will follow. Huzzah!

(This may be of interest to readers of my novelisation of _Star Wars: The Force Unleashed_, which was the first game-related novel to debut at #1 on the NYT hardback list. The two books, however, could not be more different!)

free free free THE CROOKED LETTER free free free

The Crooked Letter on Amazon (Thanks, Sean!)

The impact that learning environments will have on the way we work, Internet freedom, and the future of libraries are just some of the hot topics inside this week Media Literacy Digest. Photo credit: Jason Rhode Has the Web been helping the true growth of a greater freedom of thought, allowing individuals to develop a critical attitude and question their beliefs? Tough the question remains open, it's certainly true that the Internet has greatly helped to foster the sharing of knowledge and the exchange of opinions. Forums, online communities, or even comments to a blog post, are often the occasion to start a debate and look at things from a different perspective. As every week, you can use the pointers and open questions raised in this Digest as a compass helping you explore and make greater sense of the subtle, but disruptive changes that our society faces in these times. Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Network Weaving

Network weaving is a great term to describe how people and organizations interact, connect, share information, and form relationships. In this 20 minute video, June Holley talks about her experience with weaving networks. The term “networks” is so broad it’s tough to talk about it meaningfully without first spending time clarifying terms. Barabasi stated that “networks are everywhere. All we need is an eye for them”. I agree. While networks share structural properties (connections between nodes), how and why networks form differs with network types. For example, how does a social network translate into learning? How does being connected to a certain group of people translate into understanding? (if you’re interested, I posted a presentation last year on the subject of different ways to see learning as networked).

Net Gen Skeptic

Mark Bullen's blog has changed from Net Gen Nonsense to Net Gen Skeptic (I criticized the first title when he set up the blog last May / June. Now I think I prefer it). He reports on a recent survey at BCIT on the use of technologies by age. Short answer of the outcome:

“The results clearly show that generational differences are not the issue. Contextual issues such as the nature of the program are more important considerations when making decisions about the integration of learning technologies.”

Second Life

As with any tool that embodies a potentially new medium of interaction, Second Life has been the subject of much hype. Many companies that first embraced SL as a tool for connecting with customers have since left. Reuters, for example, set up a news bureau, reporting on all things SL. In October of last year, they closed it. The obvious response is to say something like “see, Second Life isn’t practical / useful… it’s over-hyped”. I think it’s important for companies to experiment and explore how new technologies might inform their interaction with information and with others. I’m sure Reuters has learned much more through this “failure” than they would have if the project had been a success. The value of experimenting is often found in the process, not in the outcome.

Future of Libraries

Libraries are often cited as a dying concept. In my home community, we recently built a new, expensive library… and it looks like a library. Bigger than the older building and with more books. Not much in the innovation category. However, on universities campuses, libraries are often among the busiest areas on campus. It might have something to do with free wireless, Starbucks, comfortable seating, etc. Regardless, the library field has managed to effectively reposition itself for the digital era. Academics have much to learn from the libraries to learning commons change. Confessions of a Science Librarian has compiled a list of 29 reports on the future of academic libraries.

CCK08 Wrapup Recording

This afternoon, we held a wrapup conversation for CCK08… the recording is now available. We discussed a wide-range of topics, including lurking in online environments, lessons learned from CCK08, Stephen’s serialized course feeds, what we’ll do differently for the September ‘09 offering of the course, etc. At about the 40 minute mark, we had an interesting discussion on assessment in education. My own view: assessment should be seen as matching patterns: what the learner knows and what she / he needs to know in order to achieve a degree / certificate. Instead of assessment conducted after a course, a combination of PLE / e-Portfolios and the patterns we exhibit through our daily online interaction / learning could serve as the basis for determining what field we are more qualified to work in. If I decide I want a career change, I should be able to match my existing skill set and expertise against the established criteria of other fields… and receive information on transference of existing learning. “George, you possess 48% of the needed knowledge to be a plumber, 35% to be a dentist, 105% to be an investment banker”… and then I should only be required to “gap fill” what I know vs. what I need to know. I could change careers every year!

The Liberty of the Networked

Instead of an aversion to pain, I think I have a desire to walk toward it. Last fall, during CCK08, I was blessed with the opportunity to experience Prokofy Neva (Catherine Fitzpatrick). Many course participants found her distracting (rude). I didn’t find myself nodding in agreement with her too often, but I valued her contrarian voice. We should be questioning our assumptions, our broad frameworks. I find Andrew Keen to be an important voice - not because he’s accurate or on target with his criticism - but because he is willing to question what many assume as given (though he does so in order to sell books, but similar criticism could be directed at Shirky, Scoble, and others). Ideas in tension is a good thing. Whenever I find strong agreement on principles (such as is increasingly occurring at conferences touting the value of Web 2.0 in education), I find myself wanting to push back and take the other perspective. Anyway, Tony Curzon Price discusses networks, individuals, and the collective:

“We need to exercise our collective freedom to preserve our modern liberty… Society gave power to the individual, but also had absolute power over including or excluding the individual. Collective power was bought at the cost of individual rights and certainties. One of the most troubling aspects of the wired world, with its assault on privacy and its technologies of manipulation, may recreate and amplify this aspect of the world of the ancients.”

The comment by Fitzpatrick, complete with techo-communism references (such as Stephen and I were subject to during CCK08), raises an issue I’ve been thinking about lately. What will become of the individual? Collectives are great for many things. But any view of society that does not start with the individual is disconcerting.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on February 28th 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Net Gen Skeptic - Mark Bullen Second Life - VSTE Future of Libraries - Ndul CCK08 Wrapup Recording - Marc Dietrich The Liberty of the Networked - scol22

In this RPGNet forum, a youngster asks, "I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like."

Well, let me tell you Billy, when I was a boy, there was an arcade at the Sheppard Centre, and we would sneak off there at lunch and after school and during spare periods and when we should have been in class. There were older teenagers, 18 or 19, who more or less lived there. One of them sold hash on the side, but mostly they just seemed to be bums. Really, really cool bums. One of them was amazingly good at Gauntlet. He'd play it all day long, spending an hour carefully honing a character to an incredibly buff state, and then he'd sell you his game for a couple bucks (the proto-goldfarmer of suburban Toronto!). We'd all crowd around and shout encouragement. The guy behind the counter, George, in his 20s, treated us like lovable scum, like you see bartenders treating the barflys in a sitcom from the era. We all knew whose initials were on the leaderboards. We were allowed to smoke in the arcade and we smoked like chimneys. All the games had volcano-crater burns from our butts. The worst offense in our universe was to pull the plug during someone's game. That always meant fights.

Downtown, on the Yonge Street sleaze strip, we had giant arcades, with pinball rooms at the back. These places moved a lot of hash, and no one seemed to know anyone else except for the hustlers, and theoretically they wouldn't let you in during school hours, but they also always had the latest games. Walking into one of those places was like attending Comdex -- a tour through the gimmicky universe of faster-than-light technological innovation, only we didn't have hucksters, we had to pay 25 cents for our demos (or lurk over someone's shoulder while they played).

There weren't many girls around the arcades -- later, a standard ironic/nostalgic boyfriend-girlfriend joke in my social circle was "Let's go to the arcade and you can hold my skateboard" -- but they were often very, very good. And tough. You had to swear like a sailor at the arcade.

In arcades, you queued up for popular or new games, usually. You set down a quarter or a button or something on the machine (quarters were the popular choice), and you watched, and when the next round came up (in fighting games, this was when someone lost, but in other games, it was when they ran out of quarters), you jumped in. This usually meant you were playing against someone else, so you got to know everyone who was a regular quick.

The 'no throwing' rule was kind of a house-rule for a lot of places. See, the older fighting games had really wonky response and collision detection, and in some of 'em (Mortal Kombat, for one), a throw did pretty decent damage and couldn't be interrupted in a lot of cases. If you wanted to, you could just drain down the other guy's health like that, and since everyone was paying to play, it was a dick move to do so. I know in our arcade, there was a little sticky on the Street Fighter machine, reading, "M.Bison is an automatic forfeit of next turn", which meant that, if someone chose Bison (who, in the older Street Fighters, was dangerous as hell in an experienced player's hands), they got to play one round with him, and, win or lose, they had to hand the controls over to the next player in line.

What were arcades like? (via Waxy!)

Simson writes "Beth Rosenberg and I published a fun story today about our experiences with the new face recognition that's built into both iPhoto '09 and Google's new Picasa system. The skinny: iPhoto is fun, Google is creepy. The real difference, we think, is that iPhoto runs on your system and has you name people with your 'friendly' names. Picasa, on the other hand, runs on Google's servers and has you identify everybody with their email addresses. Of course, email addresses are unique and can be cross-correlated between different users. And then, even more disturbing, after you've tagged all your friends and family, Google tries to get you to tag all of the strangers in your photos. Ick."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a followup to the recent dustup in which a group of copyright trolls who claim to control the rights to all of the Conan stories (even the out-of-copyright ones!) shut down Broken Sea Audio's distribution of free audiobooks based on the public domain stories, here's a great, exhaustively researched article on the copyright status of the Conan stories, written by a fan:

Many of the works of REH were first published during or shortly after his lifetime, from 1922 through 1939. More came out over the decades that followed, with a large amount seeing first publication after 1964. Under US law, all of the REH works first published prior to 1964 were subject to the registration, renewal and notice requirements of the 1909 Copyright Act (“the 1909 Act”). Under the 1909 Act, copyright was not automatically applied to a published work, as it is under the current Act. Instead, to obtain copyright, the work had to be first published subject to a number of rules. These included proper notice affixed to the work, and prompt registration. If works were published without meeting these formalities, such works were usually injected into the Public Domain (“the PD”). Further, 28 years after publication there was a one year window in which certain classes of people or entities could file for a renewal of the copyright for an additional 28 year term (later extended by Congress to a total term of currently 95 years). In practice, the courts have said that as long as the original registration is filed prior or simultaneously with the renewal, the registration was still valid. Further, the courts have on occasion been forgiving of flawed but still present notice under the 1909 Act. But, the courts have been quite strict about the one year window for renewals. Complete lack of notice also generally automatically injected the work into the Public Domain, though the totality of the circumstances can affect that issue.

THE COPYRIGHT AND OWNERSHIP STATUS OF THE WORKS AND WORDS OF ROBERT E. HOWARD (Thanks, Jeremy!)

chthonicdaemon writes "I have been using Linux as my primary environment for more than ten years. In this time, I have absorbed all the lore surrounding the Unix Way — small programs doing one thing well, communicating via text and all that. I have found the command line a productive environment for doing many of the things I often do, and I find myself writing lots of small scripts that do one thing, then piping them together to do other things. While I was spending the time learning grep, sed, awk, python and many other more esoteric languages, the world moved on to application-based programming, where the paradigm seems to be to add features to one program written in one language. I have traditionally associated this with Windows or MacOS, but it is happening with Linux as well. Environments have little or no support for multi-language projects — you choose a language, open a project and get it done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependency generation and cross-platform support, unfortunately making it more difficult to grow a custom build process for a multi-language project organically. All this is a bit painful for me, as I know how much is gained by using a targeted language for a particular problem. Now the question: Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java/(insert other well-supported, popular language here) and unlearn ten years of philosophy, or is there hope for the multi-language development process?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user Riblets writes:

This step by step tutorial will show you how to print, cut out, fold, and construct a gear to get you started building your own papercraft mechanical devices. There is still some small problems with the design, but I'm trying to balance ease of construction with functionality.

You will need:

1. A Laser Cutter or X-Acto Knife.

2. A T-Pin, Straight Pin, or Push Pin at least 5/8" in depth, (regular pushpins are too short and map pins bend too easily).

3. Stiff paper, Brochures and Junkmail like Restaurant Menus are a good choice as long as they fit into whatever printer you're using.

4. A half hour of time and Patience, this is very much like miniature model building.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!

With all of the stories over the past few years concerning the supposed "risks" of kids playing violent video games -- often argued over soundbites on cable news networks, The Onion comes to the rescue with the perfect antidote, wondering Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse? I wonder if Jack Thompson would like to weigh in on the debate... My favorite line: "The games all make it seem deceptively simple. I mean, in the future, a kid's not going to be able to kill a six-foot irradiated beetle just by pressing a few buttons. He's going to have to get down there with an axe, and hack and hack and hack." Indeed. Violent video games need to be even more real. Otherwise, we're all doomed.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Mytob notes that sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa is set to close down tomorrow, and the development team has something special planned for the game's final hours. The decision to close the game was made in November, and it went free-to-play a month later, while the developers continued to roll out the new content they had planned. Now, after a round of patches and server merges, the beleaguered MMO has reached its shutdown date. The game's primary enemies, the Bane, are launching an all-out offensive on Allied forces, which will culminate in a battle beginning at 8PM on Saturday and lasting until midnight. All players are being called in as reinforcements in this apocalyptic fight, though the final announcement says, "Penumbra has been informed of the situation and is standing by on the use of their last resort weapon. We can not afford to be complacent or uncertain, but if it is truly our destiny to be destroyed, we are taking them all with us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well here's an unfortunate surprise. Following the ridiculous claims of the Authors Guild that automated reading aloud of ebooks using text-to-speech software is a violation of copyright, Amazon has agreed to back down and make the TTS feature optional on a per-book basis. The company issued a statement explaining why it believes that there is no copyright violation at all, but is still making the feature optional:

Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.

Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.

Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title.

While this does, effectively, allow the copyright holders to shoot themselves in the foot yet again, it's disappointing that the company wasn't at least willing to stand up for its right to offer such a feature without needing permission.

Meanwhile, if you don't mind the temptation to bang your head against the wall repeatedly, you can read an interview the Authors Guild's Paul Aiken conducted with Engadget about this whole thing. What's amazing is his inability to even understand how having a computer read aloud a book is no different than a person reading aloud the book or the Kindle reading aloud the book. He seems to think each is a different case that deserves different rights (and, of course, different licenses).

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Joyce is a teacher and librarian. She recently got an iPhone, and has fallen in love.

Consider the portability of texts, the potential for blogging or taking notes and pictures in the field, the use of GPS for science and geography, the possibilities for organizing learning, the options for the music classroom, the opportunities to collaborate with other learners in geography-agnostics ways.

Thanks Chris

How is your school using the great gadgets that all the kids seem to have such a thirst for? What phone applications are great for education? What are the institutional barriers to using powerful new technology to help kids learn? Post your ideas in the comments, and include your photos and video in the MAKE Flickr pool.

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

We've covered the ridiculous hoops the gov't made people go through to prove that a document that the gov't itself leaked could be used in a trial to prove that the gov't was wiretapping people without warrants. Despite all the hurdles, a court ruled that the document could, in fact, be used. Some had hoped that, after the Obama administration took over, it would stop trying to kill this particular case, but that didn't happen. In fact, the Obama administration made the same claims as before, and continued to appeal the ruling. However, an appeals court has shot the administration down and allowed the document to be used. The government, of course, will likely appeal.

The whole situation still seems ridiculous. In business, if a confidential document is made public, and many people have seen it, it's no longer considered confidential. Yet, here, even though many, many people have seen the document outlining the warrantless wiretapping, the gov't still wants to pretend that it's totally secret -- in part, because it doesn't want its warrantless wiretapping program tested in court. This case is very important from a civil liberties perspective, because previous attempts to get a court to weigh in on such warrantless wiretaps failed -- due to the fact that, without specific evidence that one of the parties filing the lawsuit was actually wiretapped without a warrant, they had no standing to sue.

Every time we write about this case, we get angry comments from people claiming that we should shut up and this case should go away because the gov't needs to protect us from terrorists. I have no doubt that the gov't does, in fact, need to do quite a lot of work every single day to help protect us from those who want to kill Americans. But, there is a legal process for that, and it involves getting warrants if you want to wiretap someone. The process of getting a warrant is not hard. In fact, if you need a wiretap in a rush and can't wait for the warrant, you can go ahead with the wiretap and then go back afterwards to get the warrant. This is an important check on the ability of the gov't to spy on its citizens, and it makes sure the process is not abused (as it has been in the past). It's difficult to see how anyone who actually believes in the right to a free society could support a gov't's ability to spy on folks without any check on that power. Hopefully this case does move forward, and the rule of law is upheld where it concerns getting a warrant before wiretapping someone within this country.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

adeelarshad82 writes to point out that details have been provided for President Obama's proposed $18.7 billion in funding for NASA in 2010 (up from $17.2 billion in 2008). Quoting: "The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush's plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020. The outline does make room for an extra shuttle flight beyond the nine currently remaining on NASA's schedule, but only if it is deemed safe and can be flown before the end of 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guest blogger Paul Spinrad is not unacquainted with the grape. 

After our distant ancestors developed language, everyone could benefit from the experiences of others. But the bandwidth of speech is so low compared to one's own senses that it required huge compression and decompression at each end of the communication. This process of describing and interpreting was enabled by detailed world models that everyone carried in their heads.

Because these world models vary from person to person, the codec is lossy, and misunderstandings are inevitable. But the imprecision also makes words more timeless and intimate. If the impressions that some words convey to you resonate with you, it's because they are literally built out of the way you view the world.

Words can also lie, but along with interpreting words, we automatically assess the trustworthiness of their source. We can learn not to believe everything we hear, or to distrust certain people, and we can also set the Bible trust level to 100. No such counterpart exists for visual communication-- cameras, television, and Photoshop haven't been around long enough.

That's all background, and here's my point: It seems to me that every so often, the dominant political and cultural machine grows so large and incestuous that it loses its connection to people and makes them feel powerless and irrelevant. When this happens, in the West anyway, there's inevitably a revolution of words, of back-to-basics and idealism, against the image-conscious, superficial, wealth-obsessed Babylon. Because it's based on words, people can place their trust in it fully and spread it, and it will continue to make sense over time. It doesn't propagate through image, might, or personal influence. This empowers people again-- perhaps simply by making them feel empowered.

Big examples are the formation of Christianity and Islam, and the Protestant Reformation. Today we see other fundamentalisms. But the inevitable next one doesn't have to be intolerant and destructive. If we engage with the task of developing it, rather than avoiding it and leaving it to others, it can be a nice one.

Photo of 1522 edition of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

 

TorrentFreak is running a great guest post from someone responding to the IFPI's laughable claim that unauthorized file sharing is the root cause of the recording industry's problems these days. That's simply not true. The post does a good job laying out the details on eight other reasons why the recording industry is in trouble that have nothing to do with unauthorized file sharing. Basically, there's competition from other forms of media (video games, the internet) and there are more efficient markets and technologies that have siphoned off some of the excess profits the industry used to enjoy. It's a great list, but what it leaves out is the next step: what does that actually mean for the industry. And, the answer is that if they are willing to change their business model to adapt to this changing market, they can do amazingly well. That's because many of the inefficiencies that have been taken out of the market were costly to the record labels. By embracing what the new market allows, they can decrease their own costs, while creating an even larger market for themselves. The fact that they have chosen not to do so has nothing to do with "piracy." It has to do with their own unwillingness to change.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

commodore64_love writes with news that a number of cable companies, such as Time-Warner, Comcast, and Cox, are trying to establish themselves as content providers on the web in addition to television. They are currently negotiating with HBO, TNT, CNN, and a number of other channels to bring their programming online exclusively for cable TV subscribers. They say they're not trying to develop "some enormous new revenue opportunity," but rather trying to compete with sites like Hulu, which provide shows for free. "They pay networks a per-subscriber fee each month for the right to carry channels. But the cable companies have groused that they are paying for content that programmers are giving away for free on the Web. ... People aren't yet cutting the cord en masse - the Leichtman survey found that people who watch recent TV shows online every week are not more likely to give up TV service than other people. But the industry is heading off what could end up as a troubling trend. After all, the availability of free content online has befuddled other media industries, from music to newspapers. ... The cable companies and others involved in the talks for a TV service said their goal isn't to kill the online video goose, but to work out a plan that keeps everyone's business intact."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By audience "vote" with applause (applause meter!) at the GreenGadget design competition presented by Core77 - the Tweet-a-watt won 1st place!! The prize was $3,000 and we're donating it to Engineers without Borders - this open source hardware project, source code, schematics and all work present / future will be in the public domain. The audience at the conference seemed to value devices that could enact social change and our little twittering power meter fit the bill. Thank you so much!

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

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

---

Today's Boing Boing Video is an excerpt from a new work by the avant-garde animator David O'Reilly -- a tale of love and domestic abuse involving a digital cat and mouse. We have featured David's work on Boing Boing before, and his innovative style is not easily described. What you see here is a brief snip of a longer, 9 minute saga due to be released later today -- the whole piece is amazing, and makes more sense as a narrative work in long form. But this will introduce you to the sometimes harsh, sometimes hypnotic alternate universe David has created with these characters, and this visual style. The complete version will be distributed exclusively by Future Shorts, subscribe to their youtube channel here."

Credits: Written and Directed by David OReilly, Sound design by David Kamp & Bram Meindersma.

---

Q&A WITH ANIMATOR DAVID O'REILLY

Xeni: When we previously ran your work on Boing Boing, I described it as "vectorpunk," but you've since said you feel that wasn't the best word with which to describe what you were experimenting with. How do you describe it? Is there a term or an explanation for the process, and the aesthetic approach you're using? Talk to us about that.

David O'Reilly: Well, it's hard to pin down, but my way of working is like a path-of-least-resistance method, like when I'm building something in 3d, I just stop as soon as it looks like what it's supposed to. One of the reasons holding 3d back is that it takes so long to get anything done, I'm trying to reduce that as much as possible. With this film for instance I cut out the entire process of rendering and used previews, which take a fraction of the time to make.

Xeni: Can you tell us a little about this animation? The story, the inspiration, what you hope your audience will experience in watching it?

David: I just wanted to make something that would connect with an audience, it's a very simple story about a relationship that's hard to resolve. Underneath that I wanted to prove you could produce emotion and authenticity with something blatantly artificial and unrealistic. You can even do it without facial expressions.

Xeni: Where are you based these days? What are you up to, other than making totally mindblowingly awesome shorts like this?

David: Berlin is currently my adopted home, I want to set up a little studio here. I'm currently finishing off the opening animation for the Pictoplasma festival next month and a few other projects on the horizon. Keep checking the site!

---

Update: you can watch the entire 9 minute piece here.

It has been reported for a while that the RIAA was suffering some cutbacks and dwindling support, but techdirt is reporting that the cuts may be even deeper than most originally suspected. Who knew suing potential customers would ruin your business? "I'm sure some will somehow 'blame piracy' for this turn of events, but it's hard to see how that's even remotely the issue. The real issue is that the RIAA has basically managed to run one of the dumbest, most self-defeating strategies over the last decade. Rather than helping major record labels adjust to the changing market, it continually, repeatedly and publicly destroyed its own reputation and the reputation of the labels — each time shrinking their potential market by blaming the very people they should have been working to turn into customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The attempts by some Canadian TV writers and actors to get Canadian regulators to regulate internet content is seen by many as pretty ridiculous. The arguments make almost no sense, and seem to center on the idea that there's so much content online, that no one can find Canadian content unless (a) ISPs pay extra to fund it and (b) certain sites are forced to promote Canadian content. What's never explained is what's wrong with option (c): make good content that people want to see. That option would solve all the other issues.

That said, Rob Hyndman points us to a great analysis showing just how ridiculous it is to think that the CRTC needs to regulate online content:

Once upon a time there were only four or five television channels. Hardly anyone had the money to broadcast a television signal, and if anyone did, there were only so many spots available on the dial.

In such a world of "spectrum scarcity," it was argued, government regulation was essential to ensure a diversity of content--and, in Canada, to ensure that some of that content was Canadian. Or as the cultural nationalists had it, to make it possible for Canadians to "tell ourselves our own stories." This was the world in which the CRTC was born.

Flash forward 40 or 50 years, to a very different world. Not only are there now hundreds of conventional television channels catering to every conceivable taste, but with the advent of Internet broadcasting the constraints of cost and spectrum have disappeared. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Canadian websites, each of them, post-YouTube, potentially a broadcaster in its own right. It is now possible for any Canadian with a video camera and a laptop to transmit to every other Canadian. And the cultural nationalists' response? This just makes the case for more regulation.

It's a great point, and it's something I call the "goldilocks argument" for regulation. The original content regulations were because there was "too little" content that could be delivered over TV. Thus, there "needed" to be regulation to ensure that in that limited and scarce space, that some of it would be Canadian. But the argument now is the reverse. It's that there's "too much" content online, and thus it's hard to find good Canadian content (apparently, some people up north haven't discovered Google). So, the argument seems to be that the CRTC is needed to make sure the content is "just right" whether there's too little content or too much content available.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Over at the Quantified Self blog, Gary Wolf has a fascinating interview with a person calling himself "Phineus" about steroid use and performance tracking among serious athletes.

GW: How common is this sort of self-experimentation among athletes?

Phineus: Among athletes that perform in any strength-, speed-, or endurance-dependent sport at the highest levels, at least 80 percent use "drugs" of some type. I use this term very broadly, because from a training perspective a drug is a drug is a drug. The usual distinction between a nutritional supplement and a drug is not a biological distinction, but a legal distinction.

GW: The ones who get caught using banned drugs always say "I didn't know what I was taking!"

Phineus: Pro athletes who claim ignorance are using the only defense they can. "I thought I was injecting flaxseed oil to get bigger." Right. That would be like a NASCAR driver claiming he knows nothing about fuel or tires. His job requires he know the vehicle, and being a top professional athlete requires understanding exactly what you put in your body to get performance out of your organic machine. It could make the difference between a 7-figure or 8-figure income. Carl Lewis tested positive for performance enhancers - stimulants - the same year that Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids and had his gold medal revoked. How did Carl Lewis then inherit the gold by default? Lewis had a more developed defense - herbal tea consumption - and the term "inadvertent use" was used to dismiss the charges. Athletes know exactly what's banned -- the lists are beaten over their heads ad nauseum because sports franchises and amateur federations dislike the labor costs, PR headache, and revenue loss that scandals can produce.

Steroids and the Lost Data of Self-Experiment

We have our five winners for the Crown Publishing giveaway of The Paper Architect. They are:

Kelly Faerie
Sleep Goblin
Daniel Dorsen
WoofBoy111
Richard Kaufman

Congrats you guys! I'll send you an email and you can return your mailing addresses. And after you make some of the projects in the book, please send us pictures and we'll post them to the site!

More:
Book Giveaway: The Paper Architect by Marivi Garrido and Ingrid Siliakus

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!

CWmike writes to tell us that Sun's Scott McNealy is pushing for the Obama administration to adopt a much more open-source friendly policy similar to what has been done in Denmark, the UK, and other countries. "Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government -- particularly Linux and Sun's own products, Solaris and Java -- McNealy believes many government officials don't understand it, fear it and even oppose it for ideological reasons. McNealy cited an open-source development project that Sun worked on with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during which a federal official said "that open source was anti-capitalist." That sentiment, McNealy fears, is not unusual or isolated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's really amazing how the use of DRM makes companies do stupid things. They get so focused on "protecting" they don't realize how all that protection hurts them. It happens over and over again. The latest such example is that developers for Google's Android mobile OS are discovering they can't access paid apps in the Android Market. Why? Because Google is afraid that developers, with greater levels of access, will be able to "break" the DRM and create unauthorized copies. Of course, people will figure out how to break the DRM and make unauthorized copies anyway. So all Google has really done is (a) piss off a lot of developers (b) shrink the market for paid apps (c) make it that much more difficult for developers to get, create and test such paid apps. In all this focus on protecting, Google seems to have missed out on the fact that it's more important to be creating and building than protecting.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. "AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks -- as opposed to the usual four -- there's little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do,' said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive. Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us — living in the early decades of the information age — and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive. Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us - living in the early decades of the information age - and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European union is "overflowing with unsold cars," so much so that Toyota is renting a ship in the "Swedish port of Malmo to store thousands of unsold cars the depressed EU market does not seem to want."

A Toyota press spokesperson downplayed the news, saying it's merely an "emergency."

Toyota stores unsold cars aboard ship (Thanks, George Dyson!)

Alan Parekh, of Hacked Gadgets, write:

Using a DVD player screen, a rewired toy keyboard and toy laptop looks like it made a great start to this DIY Parallax Propeller Laptop.This project demonstrates the power of the Propeller microcontroller. Full documentation is available so that you could make your own.

"This is a Propeller laptop - with a 6502 co-processor and 64K of static RAM! The Propeller handles all I/O for the 6502 and runs an integrated debugger so you can program the computer. The Propeller serves as the programmable chipset for this 6502 laptop. You could use an FPGA in this capacity, but could you easily do this and implement visual debugger software inside an FPGA? Over the years hardware prototyping has evolved from building-block hardware (TTL) to programmable hardware (PLA's and FPGA's). I believe the Propeller represents the next revolution: 100% software-based virtual hardware - and I built this laptop to prove it!"

PROP-6502 Propeller Laptop [via HackedGadgets]

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

Details have been spilling out over the last few days that the RIAA has been making pretty massive cuts to staff. We already knew that EMI was cutting back on its support of the RIAA/IFPI, and it seems that with the rest of the RIAA's major label supporters also having economic troubles, the writing is on the wall that the RIAA is about to go through a major transformation. I'm sure some will somehow "blame piracy" for this turn of events, but it's hard to see how that's even remotely the issue. The real issue is that the RIAA has basically managed to run one of the dumbest, most self-defeating strategies over the last decade. Rather than helping major record labels adjust to the changing market, it continually, repeatedly and publicly destroyed its own reputation and the reputation of the labels -- each time shrinking their potential market by blaming the very people they should have been working to turn into customers. They may claim that they "had" to take this strategy because it's what the labels wanted (and, indeed, that was Hilary Rosen's excuse), but that's ridiculous. It was evident to pretty much anyone who took the time to understand the issues back in the mid- to late-90s, that the internet represented an opportunity to those who embraced it. The RIAA's decision to fight progress and its own customers at every turn has been nothing short of a complete disaster. That the group is now being gutted is the inevitable result of a poor strategy that could have easily been avoided.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

GlobalEcho writes "Credit default swaps (CDS) are infamous for bringing down AIG and requiring a bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars. Because the market for these was so murky, the US government has insisted that Wall Street create a clearinghouse for these contracts. In a fresh twist, part of the deal is that the models used to price CDS have been standardized, and that the pricing code was made open source, under a somewhat BSD-like license. The source code (originally written by JPMorgan) provides the basic pricing routines, plus an Excel interface. To my knowledge this is the first significant migration of an investment bank product platform from its usual super-secret proprietary home to the rest of the world."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Techdirt points out an interesting query in Slate asking why book publishers appear to be making the same mistake that record labels did with the iTunes service with DRM, and single-vendor lock-in. "Back in 2005, we noted that Apple's dominance over the online music space, which upset the record labels tremendously, was actually the record labels' own fault for demanding DRM. That single demand created massive lock-in and network effects that allowed Apple to completely dominate the market. If the record labels had, instead, pushed for an open solution, then anyone else could have built stores/players to work as well, and it could have minimized Apple's ability to control the market. Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position. So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maxis has opened the Spore API that will likely lead to some highly-evolved data mashups and apps around the game. A creature aquarium and friend activity monitor are just two of the apps already available. They're also holding a contest to encourage the API fun. Brandon has the details over at Boing Boing Offworld. "Data-mashers at the ready: Maxis opens the Spore API"

Why should you compete with new technological innovations when you can just get elected officials to pass laws that greatly limit what those innovations can do? That seems to be the position of the National Retail Federation, the trade group that represents a bunch of the big offline retailers. We wrote about their attempt to do this last year, where they went so far as to claim (and then stand behind) that eBay was driving people to shoplift. Supposedly, selling stuff on eBay was just so addictive that once people ran out of their own stuff to sell on eBay, they would all rush to the nearest big box store to shoplift. That, of course, is totally bogus and not at all backed up by the facts. But who needs facts when you have politicians willing to do your bidding? The NRF's statement was so hilarious, we can't resist republishing it:

"Thieves often tell the same disturbing story: they begin legitimately selling product on eBay and then become hooked by its addictive qualities, the anonymity it provides and the ease with which they gain exposure to millions of customers. When they run out of legitimate merchandise, they begin to steal intermittently, many times for the first time in their life, so they can continue selling online. The thefts then begin to spiral out of control and before they know it they quit their jobs, are recruiting accomplices and are crossing states lines to steal, all so they can support and perpetuate their online selling habit."

While the three laws proposed last year went nowhere, it didn't take long for all three to be introduced again. The intended purpose of these three laws is to force these online platforms to interrogate every seller over every product they put online for sale. It goes against everything that's the basis of section 230 rules for online platforms, in that it says "you're not the tool someone uses, now you're liable for everything that happens with the tool." This is not, at all, about stopping crazy eBay addicts from shoplifting from big box stores. This is about making it tougher for people to buy and sell stuff online so that more people are forced to trek out to their local offline retailer to buy stuff.

The amusing thing is that, last year, when these same bills were introduced, the retailers were asked why they couldn't just do a better job policing their stores for shoplifting -- and the retailers replied that their employees were there to sell stuff, not to be police officers. Yet, the very purpose of these laws is to make that impossible for online retail services. It forces them all to be police officers, or face tremendous liability. It's no secret that it's tough to compete with new online services, but that's no excuse for passing bogus laws to harm those online players.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

In 1995 I wrote a piece that envisioned billions of websites, one for every person on the Internet. At the time this was considered unlikely by most experts, they believed the web would evolve to become like TV, with three major networks, Yahoo, Lycos and Alta Vista. Google wasn't even born yet, yet many thought it was already over. Having been around the loop several times by then, I was sure the shakeout hadn't happened. Today I am confident that there will be thousands of Twitters, maybe millions. Just as in 1995, there are arguments that say this is wrong. "Everyone's on twitter.com," seems to be the main one, and it's a good argument. But let me argue with it.

1. I was lucky when I was a kid, I grew up within walking distance of Shea Stadium in NYC. On summer afternoons I could go with a friend or my brother and sit in the grandstands for $1.65 and watch the best teams in baseball beat the Mets. Everyone went to Shea Stadium, it was the best place for baseball in Queens, but we also played baseball at the schoolyard down the street. They were different experiences, but both were baseball, and they co-existed perfectly, in fact you could say they helped each other. Other sports worked the same. Every playground had basketball, and you could also go to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks.

2. The fact that "Everyone's on twitter.com" in some ways works against twitter.com. It's become the honeypot for all kinds of crackpots and schemers. Some people are calling themselves Twitter Pros now. Social Media Marketing Experts. I got a reply from someone today thanking me for following them; I hadn't followed them. Everyone's getting huge numbers of DMs sent from robots representing people they don't know. They come to Twitter for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.

3. All Twitters will start at the same place with the same limits, but it will be hard to evolve the mother ship, so innovation will happen more quickly in the smaller communities. Leo Laporte has pioneered here with the TWiT Army community. There will be many others. I totally want to start one for scripting.com to serve as an adjunct to the discussions that take place in the comments on blog posts. This community loves change. A system with tens of millions of users will, necessarily, change much more slowly.

Tomorrow there will be a open hackfest for Laconica, the open source software behind identi.ca and Leo's twitter, in Berkeley, starting at noon. I plan to be there for part of the day, to talk about how to get lots of these systems started in a variety of contexts.

Update: A random idea. Why shouldn't it be possible, using the FriendFeed API, to define a service that's a subset of what FF does, that more or less matches the (smaller) feature set of Twitter, and for a smaller community.

"Jam-Packed with Mountain Humor!" and "Gumbo Galahad: Screwball o' th' Hills!"

Scans from several pages of this highly offensive 1950s comic book available at Again With the Comics.

The covers from this old UK comic book called Fantasy are sterling exemplars of bulldada. I like the cover lines on the issue with the flipper-armed dinosaur: "They were used to conquest but this was a strange enemy" and "Featuring! The Crusade that was different."

Lionel Fanthorpe Badger Books Cover Gallery (Via Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine)

Cooler Master shows off a "because we can" mod of a five quad 2 core CPU system (20 x single cores) stuffed inside of a single ATCS 840 PC case. 53GHz worth of computing power. A Cooler Master 1000W Real Power M PSU was used to power everything. And they used 2.5 HDDs to reduce power consumption and noise. CPUs were water cooled, everything else was air cooled.

5 Full Systems on 1 x Real Power M1000W and Housed in a ATCS 840

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

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Parkingticket.com just announced new compatibility with the Safari web browser on Apple's iPhone, giving you new tools to immediately contest a parking ticket. The site is so confident in their service that if all steps are followed and the ticket is still not dismissed they will pay $10 towards your ticket. "The process begins by navigating the iPhone's Safari browser to the Parkingticket.com website where you'll find a straightforward means to fight a parking ticket; whether the ticket was issued in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. Simply register for a free account and choose the city in which the ticket was issued. Enter your ticket and vehicle details then answer a few quick questions. The detailed process takes about ten minutes, from A-Z. To allow easy entry of your ticket, a look-a-like parking ticket is displayed — for your specific city — with interactive functionality."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Parkingticket.com just announced new compatibility with the Safari web browser on Apple's iPhone, giving you new tools to immediately contest a parking ticket. The site is so confident in their service that if all steps are followed and the ticket is still not dismissed they will pay $10 towards your ticket. "The process begins by navigating the iPhone's Safari browser to the Parkingticket.com website where you'll find a straightforward means to fight a parking ticket; whether the ticket was issued in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. Simply register for a free account and choose the city in which the ticket was issued. Enter your ticket and vehicle details then answer a few quick questions. The detailed process takes about ten minutes, from A-Z. To allow easy entry of your ticket, a look-a-like parking ticket is displayed - for your specific city - with interactive functionality."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new Harvard Business School study, eight of the top ten states in terms of online porn consumption were ones where McCain won in the presidential election. Professor Benjamin Edelman analyzed anonymised credit cards receipts from a large online porn company. Based on their limited data, the largest consumer is Utah. Other interesting possible correlations emerged too that Edelman outlines in his paper, "Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?" published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. From New Scientist:

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

"Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers" (New Scientist),

Here's a 600 frames-per-second video showing what happens when you drop a magnet onto a grid of 90 small magnets.

Magnetic self-assembly in slow motion

Historically accurate illustration of cave people and dinosaurs, both domesticated and feral, from BibliOdyssey.

Mark Henderson of the London Times reports that researchers at the University of Reading have developed a phrasebook that "could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen."

“If a time traveller wanted to go back in time to a specific date, we could probably draw up a little phrasebook of the modern words that are likely to have sounded similar back then,” [Mark Pagel] told The Times. “You wouldn’t be able to discuss anything very complicated, but it might be enough to get you out of a tight spot.”

Dr Pagel’s research also predicts which parts of modern vocabulary are likely to survive into English as it will be spoken 1,000 years in the future, and which will die out.

By the year 3000, words such as “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze” could easily be gone. These already differ greatly between related languages, such as English and German, and are good candidates to evolve into new forms.

A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has mounted a display of unmanned aerial vehicles, essentially model airplanes outfitted with GPS, microprocessors, and surveillance tech for battlefield reconnaissance. Seen here is a prototype of the 5 pound, 45-inch AeroVironment Dragon Eye. It was launched by hand or slingshot style with a bungee cord. From Smithsonian:

Unmanned and remote-controlled aircraft have a surprisingly long history. "The technology that goes into a UAV has been around for 100 years," (museum curator Dik) Daso says, "since before World War I." Henry Ford and other top engineers helped to design both full-size and scale planes that were radio-controlled. The Great War ended before any of them could go into action. Now, Daso adds, "there are so many UAVs in the air, it's hard to keep track of them all..."

So why did (Dragon Eye co-developer Rob Colbow) decide to include this duct-taped veteran in the UAV display? "I wanted it for all the kids who, like me, have built things like this."

Under the Radar with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

John Wilbanks from Science Commons sez, "Merck just pledged a ton of high-resolution, very expensive data to the public domain, along with some software and other resources to make it work. It's going into a new non profit org (disclosure - I am a Board member) called Sage. This stuff isn't going to be open on day one - it takes a while to figure out how to give things like this away, and more time to make them *useful* - but it's on the road."

Sage resulted from the realization that the needs and potentials of clinical and molecular data to inform drug development are greater than the resources or capacity of any one company or institute. Sage is a legacy of successful proof of principle work accomplished at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. in Seattle. Core human and intellectual property resources from this effort are seeding Sage’s growth. The primary output from Sage will be an open access platform available in the public domain. An incubation period of three to five years is anticipated in which new project data are generated, critical tools for building and mining disease models are developed and governing rules for sharing, accessing, and contributing to the platform are established.

Sage is a distributed research organization with nodes embedded within core academic partner facilities. Collaborating scientists from both the nonprofit and commercial sectors will contribute to projects building and using innovative new databases and tools. More detailed information will be available soon.

Sage (Thanks, John!)

treqie writes "During the trial of pirate bay yesterday, a professor (Roger Wallis) took the witness stand. He told the court things that the prosecutors did not want to hear. The prosecutors then tried to discredit both him and his team's work in the area, as well as his title, it was a real spectacle. In the end, the judge asked if he wanted compensation for being there — he replied that he did not want anything, but they could send flowers to his wife. Many listening online heard, and began sending her flowers, from all over the world. As of this submission, the sum is over 40,000 SEK worth of flowers. There's even a Facebook group for it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we're not huge fans of the pure "give it away and pray" name-your-own-price business model, it still seems pretty ridiculous to see people like The Cure's Robert Smith blasting Radiohead for its experiment, claiming "it can't work" (thanks to Chris, for sending this in). Smith is uninformed on a number of different fronts. First, so many people get so focused on the "name your own price" part, that they forget that wasn't the only business model at all. That was just a part of the business model. At the same time they announced the pay-what-you-want downloads, they also announced an impressive boxset that cost quite a bit. Furthermore, contrary to Smith's assertion that "it can't work," it did work. In fact, it worked phenomenally well. The band sold more albums than it had in the past and it made more money. Actually, as the article points out, that Radiohead album did much, much better than the Cure's last album. Oops.

All of that info came out months ago. Apparently, Smith was too bothered "violently disagreeing" with Radiohead to notice how much money the band was pulling in. He also might want to brush up on his economics. His explanation for disagreeing with Radiohead confuses price and value drastically:

"You can't allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don't consider what you do to have any value at all and that's nonsense. If I put a value on my music and no one's prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan...."

Which, of course, has it backwards. If the music had no value, no one would want it, free or not. And, it's not that fans are "creating the value" in setting the price, it's that they're deciding how much they want to reward the artist. That's all. Perhaps instead of spending so much effort violently disagreeing, Smith should spend some time understanding the actual business models being put to good use by many different musicians, sometimes allowing them to do much better than the Cure... even if the music is "free."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I've featured interactive QuickTime VR panoramas from photographer Peter McCready previously on Boing Boing, and it looks like he has some lovely new work up. QTVRs aren't good for everything, but they're great for "big science" sites like the ones at CERN, featured here -- places best appreciated with all directions visible. Pete sends these links and says,

Whilst we ‘Big Science Porn’ (thank you for the term!) aficionados eagerly await the relaunch of the Large Hadron Collider this September, thought I’d share a few new Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment VR panoramas with you that were taken days before ‘first beam’ last year from numerous locations within Underground Experimental Cavern UXC55.

Here are the panoramas: (one, two, three, four, five, six) and there's another up from the CMS Centre (where data quality monitoring, detector calibration, data analysis and computing operations take place).

Previously on BB:
Excellent new CERN Hadron collider QTVR
CERN photos in Nat'l. Geo: The God Particle

The experimental instrument played in this video is a variation on the kou xiang (a Chinese jaw harp). This one has seven blades though and is well tempered, referring to a common type of tuning in 20th century Western music. The sound reminds me a bit of Frampton on a talk box.

This trippy fish that has been confirmed as a new species and named, appropriately enough, Histiophryne psychedelica. Scuba divers discovered it off Indonesia and University of Washington researcher Ted Pietsch tested its DNA. From the Associated Press:

Like other frogfish — a subset of anglerfish — H. psychedelica has leglike fins on both sides of its body.

But it has several traits not previously known among frogfish, wrote Pietsch, of the University of Washington.

Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That and an off-centered tail cause them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.

The fish, which has a gelatinous, fist-size body covered with thick folds of skin that protect it from sharp-edged corals, also has a flat face with eyes directed forward, like humans, and a huge, yawning mouth.

"PSYCHEDELIC" FISH PICTURE: New Species Bounces on Reef

The Nebula Ballot for best sf/f book of 2008 is up -- and I'm on it!

Little Brother - Doctorow, Cory (Tor, Apr08)
Powers - Le Guin, Ursula K. (Harcourt, Sep07)
Cauldron - McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov07)
Brasyl - McDonald, Ian (Pyr, May07)
Making Money - Pratchett, Terry (Harper, Sep07)
Superpowers - Schwartz, David J. (Three Rivers Press, Jun08)

Nebula Awards® 2008 Final Ballot

A happy baby making some sweet synth music with stubby lil fingers on a big funky keyboard.

Midas Delight (YouTube, thanks to the person who submitted this but is too ashamed to admit they're obsessed with videos of babies playing synthesizers)

Previously on Boing Boing:
* Naked Baby Plays a Synthesizer (video)
* Yet Another Baby Playing a Synthesizer (video, this time with pants)

A quick note of update on a previously-announced contest that Boing Boing Video is running with the band Groove Armada and their "record label"/digital music distributor, Bacardi: details on the contest are here in a previous BB post, the news is that we're extending the contest through March 5 with winners to be announced shortly thereafter. How it works: you sign up to download DRM-free MP3s and share with other folks, and by doing so you're entered to win an Apple iPod Touch, courtesy of Boing Boing Video. If you'd like to participate, here's the magic link, and again, all the details on how it works and some notes on privacy/rights issues are in this previous BB post. As for the music: I've signed up to participate, and I've downloaded a number of tracks from the new EP this content is intended to promote. I am digging them mightily. Enjoy.

Glyn Moody writes "Thanks to the indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to see how an organization close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write — and hijack — an important European Union open source strategy paper, currently being drawn up. Analyzing before and after versions visible in the document demonstrates how the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying group partially funded by Microsoft, is trying to widen the scope of open source to include 'mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.'" And reader Elektroschock adds some detail on EU processes: "The European Commission lets ACT and CompTIA participate in all working groups of the European Open Source Strategy, which defines Europe's future open source approach. A blue editor questions the objectives: 'Regarding the "Europe Digital Independence" our [working] group thinks it is, in general, not an issue.' 'European digital independence' is a phrase coined by EU Commissioner V. Reding, that is what her European Software Strategy was supposed to be about. She didn't reveal that lobbyists or vendors with vested interests would write the strategy for the Commission."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Woo! We're here all day @ Greener Gadgets! Stop by! The first ever Twittering power meter (Tweet-a-Watt) is working and on display too!

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

Back in 2005, we noted that Apple's dominance over the online music space, which upset the record labels tremendously, was actually the record labels' own fault for demanding DRM. That single demand created massive lock-in and network effects that allowed Apple to completely dominate the market. If the record labels had, instead, pushed for an open solution, then anyone else could have built stores/players to work as well, and it could have minimized Apple's ability to control the market. Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position.

So why are book publishers doing the same thing?

Farhad Manjoo has an interesting article in Slate where he notes that publishers are worried about Amazon turning into "the Apple of the book industry," yet at the same time, they're the ones who are pushing for DRM and limitations that will effectively lock users in to Amazon's ebook platform for a long time. If the publishers had insisted on more open solutions, then a real competitive market could develop. That would be better for everyone. As great as the new Kindle is, it's still rather expensive. Allowing others to enter the market would lead to greater innovation -- making it easier for more people to get into the ebook reader market, and open up plenty of new opportunities for publishers. But the dumb and pointless infatuation with "DRM" and "protecting" works will basically hand the market over to Amazon for many years, and get many folks locked into to Amazon's Kindle platform, even when more open solutions finally start to become popular.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

MissMachine writes "I'm a computer science major who has been recently getting involved in local grassroots politics in my county and state. I've been discussing the idea with some of my state legislatures of submitting a couple of resolutions, opening up to the idea of switching to open source software in our state's K-12 schools. I'm looking for more information/literature about this topic, open source solutions in public K-12 education, pros and cons, studies that prove or disprove many of the assumptions of open source and linux in public schools. Any help in this field?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David sez, "On a decentralized network it's much harder to map blockages than to create them. Herdict.org takes a crowdsourcing approach. Install the add-on and click the button when you encounter a site that's down. Herdict aggregates this information, including your geographic location, to draw a map of the Internet's potholes, including the ones intentionally dug by frightened governments. If you have a few spare minutes, you can check sites others have reported as down, determining whether they're blocked in your part of the world as well. (www.AmIBlockedOrNot.org will take you to that part of the Herdict site.) Herdict is a project of Harvard's Berkman Center (sponsored by Jonathan Zittrain) and obeys all the appropriate privacy rules of the road."

Herdict (Thanks, David!)

DeviceGuru writes "Having recently constructed the BoxeeBox, DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum naturally was eager to check out Neuros Technology's somewhat similar IP-TV set-top box. Lehrbaum's first-impressions review of the Neuros Link describes the device's hardware and Ubuntu-based software, shows screenshots of its functionality, identifies a handful of weak spots, offers some specific suggestions for improvement, and shares a few hacks (including adding an HDD and Boxee). All in all, he concludes, the Link's hardware is more than worth its minimal $300 pricetag."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld, we've launched a new contest with Phenomic/EA's upcoming PC collectible card strategy game BattleForge to write a story based on one of its cards (right) that'll land in the final game, early beta keys for the first 1000 readers, and ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphics cards for the top three winners. Check the post for more details, and good luck! Elsewhere, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol has a lengthy chat with Quake Wars designer Ed Stern on whether or not games are weird enough, someone creates an amazing 1080p HD digital pinball cabinet, and the creator of the real-world Portal gun strikes back with a jaw-dropping reproduction of BioShock's Little Sister Adam syringe. We also saw Cooking Mama come to the iPhone, King Hippo and Soda Popinski speak out in a new Mike Tyson biopic, an interesting looking new rhythm/action indie PC game, and MF Doom/Ghostface Killah pop up with a new track for the DS's Grand Theft Auto. Finally, we rounded up the best of the incoming Wii/DS games for the remainder of spring, watched an illuminating David Lynch-namedropping speech by Rolando creator Simon Oliver, and a new hardware mashup that does Ben Heck proud: a Dreamcast crossed with a G3 iMac.

The folks at Facebook are notoriously proud of the granular levels of privacy their system allows, such that you can pick and choose what you share with different people. Apparently, all of that is meaningless to a judge in Ontario, who has decided that if you use Facebook at all, your profile can be used against you in a civil court case, even if you set it to private. The judge's reasoning is quite troubling:

a court can infer from the social networking purpose of Facebook, and the applications it offers to users such as the posting of photographs, that users intend to take advantage of Facebook's applications to make personal information available to others. From the general evidence about Facebook filed on this motion it is clear that Facebook is not used as a means by which account holders carry on monologues with themselves; it is a device by which users share with others information about who they are, what they like, what they do, and where they go, in varying degrees of detail. Facebook profiles are not designed to function as diaries; they enable users to construct personal networks or communities of "friends" with whom they can share information about themselves, and on which "friends" can post information about the user.

That's sort of true. It is for sharing content with others... but the very point is that you get to choose who those others will be. So, even if it's not exactly like a diary, it could be considered a diary that is just shared with a select group of individuals. Just because I share something secret with one other person, does not mean I automatically have consented to have that information shared with everyone. I wonder if this means that all of the judge's correspondences with others should be opened to the public. After all, the judge is obviously not conducting a monologue with himself, but uses things like email or letters or phone calls to share information with others.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Robin sez, "You can watch the animated movie 'Sita Sings the Blues', IN FULL online. It will be broadcast in the NYC area at 10:45pm on Saturday, March 7. Feel free to write your local PBS station to see if they will broadcast 'Sita'."

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

Watch “Sita Sings the Blues” online (Thanks, Robin!)

Barence writes "Microsoft has unveiled a slew of new features that will appear in the Release Candidate of Windows 7 that didn't make an appearance in the beta. 'We've been quite busy for the past two months or so working through all the feedback we've received on Windows 7,' explains Steven Sinofsky, lead engineer for Windows 7 in his blog. A majority of these features are user interface tweaks, but they should add up to a much smoother Windows 7 experience." In separate news, Technologizer reports on Microsoft's contingency plan, should things not go well in EU antitrust, to slip Win7 to January.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Young maker Max Wallack designed this system for using plastic, wire, and packing peanuts to construct a shelter for homeless people and disaster victims, and he won a hefty design prize for it. Keep up the good work, Max! Via Geekologie.

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

• Mat Honan finds a bedazzlingly ridiculous thread about ... well, you should just go and see it.
• Joel greeted you from outside Denver.
• In an unused ad, a BlackBerry destroys an Apple.
• There was a secret gathering of the Order of the Lamp
• We hid our spare keys in a sprinkler head.
• Big Dog, the military pack-bot, is back for more creepy robot ballet.
• Electrically-heated pants prove snowboarding is the new golf.
• You can buy tiny models of classic Sega arcade games.
• Behold! The world's smallest escalator.
• The iPhone is now free in Japan.
• Some Circuit City liquidators are being nice about testing stuff you've bought before you leave the store.
• Details emerge of Sony's Playstation Portable 2. CEO Stringer got a promotion, and a free hand to restructure the company.
• Small British ISPs declined to work with the self-appointed censors who blocked Wikipedia and The Internet Archive.
• Motorola "launched" a cellphone. Into a field.
• Google banned "Netbook" ads at Psion's behest.
• Would you like a Steampunk empire? Build one out of Lego!
• Datel made a NES-style Wii controller. Cheap!
• Verizon announced the LG Versa.

Ponca City, We love you writes "With a high level of technical sophistication, critical customers, and high innovation rate, Japan is the toughest cell phone market in the world. So it's not surprising that although Apple is the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, selling 10 million units in 2008, in Japan the iPhone is selling so poorly it's being offered for free. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera, multimedia text messaging, nor a TV tuner. Pricing plans in Japan are also very competitive, and the iPhone's $60-and-up monthly plan is too high compared to competitors; a survey lat year showed that among Japanese consumers, 91% didn't want to buy an iPhone. The cellular weapon of choice in Japan would be the Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV and features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera, and motion sensors for Wii-style games. 'When I show this to visitors from the US, they're amazed,' according to journalist Nobi Hayashi, who adds, 'Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pre-PMA 2009: Epson has announced a new version of the R-D1 rangefinder on its Japanese website. The new R-D1x model maintains most of the features of the previous camera including a 6Mp APS-C sensor, but adds a larger 2.5" LCD screen, support for the higher-capacity SD-HC card format and a removable handgrip. Epson will start shipping the new rangefinder from April 2009, at a price to be confirmed.

Check out this circuit-bending Austin celebration tonight:

No cover charge, and all-ages friendly. Map here; hope to see you there!

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

Mark Cuban, picking up on the rumors last week that the cable companies are negotiating with content providers to offer their channels over the internet, has a suggestion for newspapers: do the same deal. Specifically, he's suggesting that newspapers get broadband providers to pay them to provide access to their content to subscribers. The idea is that in a sort of Coasian bargain, it allows the newspapers to get more money (from just a few companies, rather than from tons of advertisers and subscribers) and it allows the ISPs to differentiate. In reality, this is just the controversial ESPN 360 model all over again. ISPs pay a content provider, and only subscribers to that content provider get access to that content. The content provider gets easy cash, and the ISP gets differentiation. It basically just hides the paywall. Rather than individuals paying for the content directly, they pay for it indirectly via their broadband connection.

What could go wrong?

Well, plenty, actually. First of all, that content really does need to be differentiated. That might sorta (but not totally) work with ESPN, but it's not going to work with most newspapers -- where the competition is pretty strong. The ISPs won't be willing to pay very much because the "value" in differentiating isn't very high. The fact that ESPN is getting away with this isn't so much a statement on how good a business model this is, as it is an indication of just how lousy many other sports content sites remain. That, however, represents a nice opportunity for other sports sites to step up and provide better content.

But, more importantly, cutting off open access to news in this manner creates the same exact problems that paywalls created. It cuts off the ability to interact with the news: to share it and spread it to others. You can still comment on it... somewhat, but the inability to have everyone you interact with see the same content is a greatly limiting factor in discussing a particular story. It actively decreases the value of the news, which is the last thing news organizations should be doing these days. It shrinks their one real asset: their community. The problem is that Cuban (and many others) still seem to be thinking about the issue from the perspective of a broadcast media company, pushing a message out to people, rather than a communications media company. When you realize that news operations need to be communications companies, the idea of making content harder to access seems more and more ridiculous.

Either way, we may soon get an example of how poorly this works in practice. Many are suggesting that Cablevision's decision to charge for access to Newsday is really a way to test this in action. The company can give Cablevision internet service customers Newsday for free as an extra incentive. But, once again, that assumes people think that's actually an incentive.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

darthcamaro writes in with an interview with Markus Rex, Novell's top Linux exec and the former CTO of the Linux Foundation. While some open source vendors see the current economy as a boon to open source, the interview concludes with Rex's speculation on the contrary possibility. "The other thing is in both Europe and the US the rise of the unemployment rate is something that is rather unprecedented... The open source community to a certain degree is dependent on the willingness of people to contribute. We see no indication that anything might change there, but who knows? People need something to live off." Have you thought about scaling back open source work as the economy continues to contract?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What is a Cellular Automata? It's a collection of colored cells on a grid that morphs through a number of time steps according to a set of rules based on the state of the neighboring cells. Put these endless patterns on your TV with this easy to construct kit from the Maker SHED.
Pick up the Cellular Automata Video Synthesizer kit here.
To download The Cellular Automata Video Synthesizer MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Weekend Projects | Digg this!