bfire writes "The term 'killer app' gets tossed around quite liberally these days. Nearly every piece of software released seems to be pitched as having the potential to send shockwaves throughout the IT world. In reality, there have been precious few applications which have truly changed the computing industry over the years. This article lists some of the top ten true killer apps that changed computing, from Phil Zimmermann's gold standard in encryption, PGP, to Dr Solomon's groundbreaking anti-virus toolkit, to Mitch Kapor who took the idea of VisiCalc for Apple and created Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS." Typical for top-10 lists, the choices seem pretty arbitrary — what changed your corner of the computing world?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These stockings printed with veins and arteries are 41,00€ from UpFactory.
Collants/Bas veines et artères (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

alphadogg writes with this snippet from Network World: "The Internet has brought new hope to reformists in China since the country crushed pro-democracy protests in the capital 20 years ago. But as dissidents have gone high-tech, the government in turn has worked to restrict free speech on the Internet, stifling threats to its rule that could grow online. China has stepped up monitoring of dissidents and Internet censorship ahead of June 4, when hundreds were killed in 1989 after Beijing sent soldiers to its central Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. The authoritarian government wants to ensure that date and other sensitive anniversaries this year pass without public disturbances, observers say. In recent months, China has blocked YouTube and closed two blog hosting sites, bullog.cn and fatianxia.com, known for their liberal content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla execs John Lilly and Mitchell Baker were interviewed at the WSJ's All Things Digital conference last week. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discussed the history of Firefox, proprietary versus Open Source development and the debut of Chrome and Mozilla's changing relationship with Google. A great interview. Well worth reading. There's video as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I asked a question on Twitter: "An example of a non-monetary gift you couldn't accept from a company you cover? Why?"

Some of the answers...

Michael Calore: "copy of shrink-wrapped software i didn't review, comp tickets to a show/concert sponsored by a company i write about often"

Janet Ginsburg: "at businessweek (a while back) strong rule re no gifts. kept things clean. sm conf swag (pens, bags) but that's it."

Doug Levy: "just as physicians are inadvertently biased by trinkets like drug co pens, reporters need to vigorously avoid potential bias."

Freda Moon: "I was taught to accept no gifts from sources. None. Not tickets. Not a meal. Not even a cup of coffee. That last one can be hard."

Megan Taylor: "Tickets to sporting events. Reporters are supposed to be objective and accepting gifts compromises that."

There seems to be a consensus here.

Now a followup question.

Can you accept placement on Twitter's Suggested Users List if you are a journalist who covers Twitter?

Please this question is only for journalists.

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: $14 Video Camera Stabilizer. You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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I was thrilled to host a panel discussion yesterday at Maker Faire with some of my favorite kinetic artists: Nemo Gould, Ben Cowden, Reuben Margolin, and Greg Brotherton. I was joined on the panel by Amy Brotherton, co-owner of Device Gallery in San Diego. The talk was entitled "Fantastic Contraption: The Device Artists," referencing the gallery and a show they mounted there last year, but also speaking to the incredible, out of this world techno-art these folks create. All of these artists are actually here as part of a larger group of Bay Area artists called Applied Kinetic Arts which also includes Jonathan Foote, Carl Pisaturo, Kal Spelletich, Alan Rorie, Mark Galt, Janine Miller-Fritz, and Christopher T Palmer. The work they're showing is amazing, so if you get a chance, stop by their exhibit area in Expo Hall.

Above is a video interview my son Blake shot of John Edgar Park of Make: television interviewing Greg Brotherton about his piece Pendulum.

Applied Kinetic Arts

From the Maker Shed:

Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption from the the Maker Shed celebrates the genius of invention and ingenuity with a showcase of works from an international roster of artists including -- H.R. Giger, Ashley Wood, Stéphane Halleux, Viktor Koen, Christopher Conte, Gregory Brotherton, Mike Libby, Nemo Gould, and many others. Foreword by our very own Senior Editor, Gareth Branwyn. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Mirell writes "Time Warner Cable has recently changed their Terms of Service, so that they are allowed to charge you at their discretion via consumption-based billing. They were shot down a few months ago after raising the wrath of many subscribers and several politicians. Now they're trying again, but since they make exclusions for their own voice and video not to count against the cap, this could draw the attention of the FCC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Maker Faire you can actually touch an amazing collection of books, kits, projects and more in the Maker Shed. Come on by for a demo of some of the kits, meet the designers and makers of the kits, learn to solder on your own gear. It is really nice to check out the things in the Maker Shed in person after seeing them on the site or in the Maker Shed Store. Meeting the makers of the kits and seeing the demos can help give some great ideas of what you can do for projects using the kits.

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Tentacle-horror Victorian engraving remixer Dan Hillier's got a couple of new t-shirts out; I got one today and it's stupendous! (he's also got a series of new engravings)

Shirt 1

Shirt 2

This week's Time Out London details a wicked and arch web-hoax-thing; someone has put plaques on benches all around London celebrating the eccentric Devenish-Phibbs family (in London, as in many places, public benches are paid for as memorials and get a small plaque to accompany them); the Devenish-Phibbs benches include "You're born, you're dying, you're dead. If your relatives are cheap they get you a bench. Monty Devenish-Phibbs 1847 - 1910" and "This was one of my favourite views. You can see it better if you move along the bench a bit. Come on, shuffle along. Bit more. More. No, more. There. Now look In commemoration of Barbara Devenish-Phibbs: Mother, wife, nag."

The joke circles back to croydevenishphibbs.co.uk, a site seemingly maintained by a cranky "silver surfer" who is offering rewards for information about his family's many plaques. When Time Out contacted him, he stayed in character (if, indeed, it is a character) perfectly: "As I explain on my home page I'm appealing for information about any of the hundreds of Devenish-Phibbs around Great Britain and sending out rewards for people who pass on details and photographs. Winter is beginning to take its toll and three residents have died in recent weeks. There's a rather macabre sense that The Bingo of Eternity is in session - whose number will be called next? With warm regards, Croy Devenish-Phibbs."

London's benches and the strange case of Croy Devenish-Phibbs

Croy Devenish-Phibbs

FlyByPC writes "We're in the first stages of designing a course in programmable devices at the university where I work. The course will most likely be centered around various small projects implemented on an FPGA dev board, using a Xilinx Spartan3-series FPGA. I have a bit of experience working with technologies from 7400-series chips (designing using schematics) to 8-bit microcontrollers to C/C++. FPGAs, though, are new to me (although they look very interesting.) If you were an undergraduate student studying programmable devices (specifically, FPGAs), would you prefer the course be centered on VHDL, Verilog, a little of both, or something else entirely? (...Or is this an eternal, undecidable holy-war question along the lines of ATI/nVidia, AMD/Intel, Coke/Pepsi, etc...?) At this point, I've only seen a little of both languages, so I have no real preference. Any input, especially if you're using one or both in the field, would be very helpful. Thanks, and may all of your K-maps be glitch-free."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This article at Gamasutra takes a look at how the compulsion to hoard and accumulate objects, as well as the desire to accomplish entirely abstract goals, has become part of the modern gaming mindset. "The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation explains that in compulsive hoarders: 'Acquiring is often associated with positive emotions, such as pleasure and excitement, motivating individuals who experience these emotions while acquiring to keep acquiring, despite negative consequences.' Sound familiar? The 'negative consequences' of chasing after the 120th star in Mario 64 or all 100 hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto III may be more subdued than those of filling your entire house with orange peels and old cans of refried beans. But game designers know that it's pretty damn easy to tap into this deep-rooted need to collect and accumulate. And like happy suckers we buy into it all the time, some to a greater degree than others."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kids of all stripes are having a really fun time learning and making their own creations at Make: Play Day. Michael Shiloh is sort of in charge, but the whole system is wonderfully self regulating. There are a couple of different areas, disassembling technojunk, building projects with the aid of a crew of dedicated and curious volunteers and building with a bit of benevolent supervision in the Hot Area with soldering irons and glue guns. The stuff from the disassembly area migrates between the other areas, and people combine parts from printers, computers and other devices to create the things of their imaginings. On Education Day, groups of school kids started a marble run, which has evolved throughout the weekend.

When Maker Faire is done, all of the material will go off for proper Ewaste recycling.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "If one attempted to distill a single prevailing emotion or attitude about government on Slashdot, I think it is fairly arguable that the winner would be cynicism or skepticism. Well here's a story that could make us skeptical and/or cynical about our skepticism and/or cynicism. Chalk one up for those who like to point out that, occasionally, the system does work. You may recall that the US Supreme Court has been mulling over whether to grant the film industry's petition for certiorari seeking to overturn the important Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings decision from the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. This was the case which held that Cablevision's allowing its customers to make copies of shows and store them on Cablevision's servers for later viewing did not constitute a direct copyright infringement by Cablevision, there being no 'copy' made since the files were in RAM and buffered for only a 'transitory' duration. The Supreme Court asked the Obama DoJ to submit an amicus curiae brief, giving its opinion on whether or not the film companies' petition for review should be granted. The government did indeed file such a brief, but the content of the brief (PDF) is probably not what the film companies were expecting. They probably thought they had this one in the bag, since some of the very lawyers who have been representing them have been appointed to the highest echelons of the Obama DoJ. Instead, however, the brief eloquently argued against the film companies' position, dismembering with surgical accuracy each and every argument the film companies had advanced."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wandering through east London today, I happened upon a damned good shoutin' R&B duo busking on the street. They're called Dead Plants, and the act I saw consisted of one guy slapping the everlasting hell out of a bass while the other guy beat out hillbilly blues on an acoustic guitar; they stamped out time on the cobblestones and hollered out insane lyrics about Johnny Cash. I was hooked. The baby was hooked. I bought their CD, Streetsongs, and it's spinning right now in the baby's room CD player (the only CD player left in the house!) and we're both rockin' out.

So there you have it.

Dead Plants

In this blog post, the author plots the results of 19 different benchmark tests across 72 programming languages to create a quantitative comparison between them. The resulting visualizations give insight into how the languages perform across a variety of tasks, and also how some some languages perform in relation to others. "If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose languages would cluster at the top left. Let's call them system languages. The elegantly concise but sluggish languages would cluster at the bottom right. Let's call them script languages. On the top right you would find the obsolete languages. That is, languages which have since been outclassed by newer languages, unless they offer some quirky attraction that is not captured by the data here. And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sarah's Smash Shack in San Diego rents out soundproof rooms full of thrift-store crockery for you to smash. They supply sharpies so you can write the names of the things you're smashing in effigy on the plates first, and the rooms have loud speakers you can play your angry music through.

Sarah's Smash Shack

The first four issues of Michael Kupperman's awesome comedy comics zine Tales Designed to Thrizzle have been collected into a single hardcover volume that is a superdense wad of funny, surreal, bent humor, including The Buzz Aldrin Mysteries (the radio operator has been murdered, any one of the seven people on the moon could have done it!); two cowboys kicking the hell out of each other for 10 panels while shouting "I'd say comics are serious literature" and "I say they ain't"; the World Famous Apairy Hat (Girls Love it, Bears Want to Stick Their Paws In It!); a thirties nostalgia comic about an unemployed former courtroom ghost who is shrunk down and has nothing but amoebas to eat for two years; and a video game called Big City Marathon ("Keep your finger on the forward arrow key for 26 hours to win"). This is weird, funny, Subgenius-esque toilet reading that will keep you very regular.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle

An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting: "Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daniel Terdiman, of CNet, has put together a nice package of pieces on Maker Faire, centered on the DIY robotics movement that annually finds expression here.

Photos: DIY bringing robotics to the masses
In search of a do-it-yourself Wall-E
Photos: Getting ready at Maker Faire
Snapshots from the 2009 Maker Faire
Behind the scenes as Maker Faire gets ready

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theodp writes "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that the Lituus, a 2.4m (8ft) -long trumpet-like instrument, was played in Ancient Rome but fell out of use some 300 years ago. Bach even composed a motet (a choral musical composition) for the Lituus, one of the last pieces of music written for the instrument.. But until now, no one had a clear idea of what this instrument looked or sounded like until researchers at Edinburgh University developed software that enabled them to design the Lituus even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument." (Continues below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dale Wheat has been messing about with kits, making a tiny collection of AVR based blinky kits. They may be the most inexpensive kits in the Maker Shed, but these kits have lots of features programmed into them. Most of the ones he shows here use programmable chips, so if you don't like the programs that they come bundled with, you can rewrite them and make your own. Come on down to Maker Faire this Sunday and continue the fun.

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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Australian: "Japan's increasingly frantic efforts to lead the world in green technology have put it on a collision course with the ambitions of China and dragged both government and industry into the murky realm of large-scale mineral smuggling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Australian: "Japan's increasingly frantic efforts to lead the world in green technology have put it on a collision course with the ambitions of China and dragged both government and industry into the murky realm of large-scale mineral smuggling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted a stellar Team Fortress-themed mobile:

One of Valve's most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they're instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.

And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and "extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze," and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow's jarate-tossing champs today.

If there's a Left 4 Dead one, I'm doomed -- it's all the wife can talk about these days; we'd end up with one in ever room, and Alice running around making pew-pew noises at them.

Shadowplay: SaltyandSweet's Team Fortress mobile

Discuss this on Offworld

Here are two videos of the amazing physicist Richard Feynman tearing it up on the bongos drums.

This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495.
Temple University School of Medicine Skull Yearbook

Youth Radio, a group that MAKE editor David Pescovitz is involved with did a cool sound project at the Faire. He writes on Boing Boing:

My friends from Youth Radio were at the Maker Faire Bay Area today, creating a live soundscape. Students roamed the fairgrounds collecting audio samples on flash recorders. As the roving reporters brought back their "tape" to the Youth Radio booth, others used Peak and Reason software to cut-up, loop, and collage the audio into a sick soundscape. The young people on the scene were Kenyon Colvin-Williams, Skyler Brynat, Luis Florez, Derrick Underwood, Khadejhia Kassenbrock, and Austin DeRubira. Production support came from Ben Frost, Charlie Foster, and Rachel Krantz.

Youth Radio remixes Maker Faire

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The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a thought-provoking feature on the use of laptops and Internet services by homeless people, who, like everyone else, use them for civic engagement with politicians, social interaction, job hunting, and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

And even then, there will be destitute former music execs, living rough on the streets, using their laptops to argue that no, it's not a human right: you should be deprived of your Internet access if you're accused of copyright infringement, because the Internet is just a machine for making copies of trivial, copyrighted entertainment products.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet..."

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life...

Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions...

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired (via Isen)

(Image: Brian L Frank for the Wall Street Journal)

Calling all pilots and aerial photographers - If you're in the air above the San Mateo County Expo Center/Fairgrounds, the Maker Faire team would much appreciate a pic! One day of faire-ness remains (tomorrow 5-31-09) so if you're able to capture a sky shot, please post a link or send it in - thanky!

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My friends from Youth Radio were at the Maker Faire Bay Area today, creating a live soundscape. Students roamed the fairgrounds collecting audio samples on flash recorders. As the roving reporters brought back their "tape" to the Youth Radio booth, others used Peak and Reason software to cut-up, loop, and collage the audio into a sick soundscape. The young people on the scene were Kenyon Colvin-Williams, Skyler Brynat, Luis Florez, Derrick Underwood, Khadejhia Kassenbrock, and Austin DeRubira. Production support came from Ben Frost, Charlie Foster, and Rachel Krantz.

Mixing Maker Faire

thefickler writes "HDMI Licensing LLC, the company that determines the specifications of the HDMI standard, is set to release the HDMI 1.4 spec on 30 June. Unfortunately it could very well be the most confusing thing to ever happen to setting up a home theater. When the new cables are released, you're going to need to read the packaging very carefully because effectively there are now going to be five different versions of HDMI to choose from — HDMI Ethernet Channel, Audio Return Channel, 3D Over HDMI, 4K x2K Resolution Support and a new Automotive HDMI. At least we can't complain about consumer choice."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sun Curve is a project for schools to help kids learn about solar energy, wind, biology and natural systems exhibiting at Maker Faire. The Sun Curve uses Open Educational Resources to support their curriculum.

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ArfBrookwood writes "Every year, I write a Christmas Letter and send it to about 50 people, and every year, it's different. One year it was just the word blah blah blah over and over with keywords, one year I made papercraft wallets with full color cards and money in them, another year I created a Christmas Letter writing contest that instructed the recipients to create our Christmas Letter for us and we awarded prizes to winners, last year, I took a fake retro photo of my family, Inkscaped/GIMPed in a chemistry set and some wall art, printed it onto CD covers, and burned retro Christmas songs onto digital vinyl and sent everyone in the family what looked like a miniature Christmas album. Last week, I came into the possession of 78 2GB USB drives. I have already taken the time to wipe them clean and reflash the memory so they are blank slates." Now, Arf's looking for suggestions for how to best use all these drives; read on for more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "San Franciscan Charles Pitts has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs a Yahoo forum, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. Nothing unusual, right? Except Pitts has been homeless for two years and manages this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge. Thanks to cheap computers, free Internet access and sheer determination, the WSJ reports that being homeless isn't stopping some from staying wired. 'You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper,' says Pitts. 'But you need the Internet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

This has been an exciting---and exhausting---two weeks, guestblogging for Boing. I don't see how the regular Boing bloggers get anything else done.

As a parting offering, I'd like to share some of my reminiscenses about Silicon Valley as I found it when I moved here in 1986.

[Me in 1985, photo by David Abrams. I don't remember exactly why I drew the line on the photo...something about distinguishing between the two halves of the brain, that is, the writer side vs. the programmer side.]

A little background. Over the last year I've been working on a memoir called Nested Scrolls, and I'm hoping to find a publisher for it soon.

The memoir's title has to do with two things: (a) my favorite kinds of cellular automata rules make seething scroll-like patterns that nest together like layers of scrolls, and (b) you can think of writings as being scrolls, and to the extent that a multilevel written work refers to other works, it's a nested scroll.

What I'm posting here is Chapter 10 of Nested Scrolls, called "Hacker"---and this particular chapter is about diving into the Bay Areas scene of yore. Here's an excerpt:

In 1987 I attended an annual event called the Hackers Conference. Remember—hacker was still a good word, so these guys were Silicon Valley programmers and hardware tweakers. Some of them were even fans of my books. The fact that I’d written a science fiction novel called Software had put me on the hackers’ radar.

I brought my computer with its CA axe [that is, its hand-made cellular automata accelerator card from Systems Concepts labs], and I stayed up all night with the hackers, drinking beer, smoking pot, and admiring our weird screens. Although Hollywood often depicts hackers as nerdy, inhibited types, that’s not generally accurate. It’s more common that hackers are like hippies or acid freaks or mad scientists or car mechanics.

And with that I'm outta here. Rock on, y'all, and, if you liked my posts, come see me at Rudy's Blog.

mlingojones writes "The Palm Pre doesn't come out until June 6th, but the Boy Genius Report not only got their hands on one but also posted a review of it. They liked webOS, but not the hardware (especially the keyboard). Overall, they feel that 'once people are able to play a real unit themselves, there will be more than a lot of happy Palm Pre customers.'" On the downside, this review says the keyboard is lousy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Rose of Institut Fatima demonstrates the versatility of the object-tracking software with his reacBall interface. I expect a jumpsuit covered with these will be showing up quite soon (I hope). [via Create Digital Music]

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An anonymous reader writes with a link to Ars Technica's report that "the EU is considering forcing Windows users to choose a browser to download and install before they can first browse the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). While the latest Windows 7 builds let you uninstall IE8, 'third-party browser makers like Opera, Mozilla and Google are pushing for tough sanctions against Microsoft. The EU would rather have a "ballot screen" for users to choose which browsers to download and install as well as which one to set as default. The bundling requirement might end up becoming a responsibility for manufacturers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Smithwick is working on developing a system so that people can design houses, buildings and other structures in Sketchup, then have the parts cut on a Shopbot, which can then be put together with a few more tools than a rubber mallet. Dan has been working with MIT Professor Larry Sass.

Take a look at his site, Physical Design make a design and put your puzzle house together!

At the Faire you'll be able to see first hand how easy and fun the Physical Design Co structures are to assemble and you'll be able to meet the co-founders who have developed this technology.

You can download the 3D model of the San Mateo Artist's Studio from the Physical Design Co website.

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Lyonhrt writes "Engadget and Gizmodo have spilled the beans on the news of the new UMD-less PSP Go that comes with 16GB of memory and a slide screen; also among the features will be built-in Bluetooth and and an undisclosed memory slot. The console will be sold alongside the PSP 3000, no details on price at this time. This is obviously Sony's answer to the lost battle with the PSP Homebrew and Hacking Communities which have cost many thousands of lost sales with custom firmwares."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this short video, sneering rappers from the young conservative movement bust rhymes about drilling in Alaska, forcing women to bear foetuses to term, eliminating social programs and merging Church and State. Lines include: "Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged;" and "Everyone can succeed because our soldiers bleed."

It's (apparently) not a parody.

Why Conservatives Can't Dance

jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't know why I remembered this story last night, but that's when it happened.

When I was a kid, in sixth grade in PS 32 in Queens, there was a deal where we could get the NY Times for students. It was a special edition, with some of the big words edited out, or perhaps explained. I got it even though I had been reading the full adult version for a few years.

We also had a weekly quiz that was written by someone at the Times. It was multiple choice and it indicated (I guess) whether or not you had read the Times that week. There was one question on one test that really caused me trouble. What's the largest state in the US? There were four choices, and two of them were Alaska and California. That's a nightmare because they didn't say what the criteria was. Is it largest by area or population? So I chose Alaska, because I felt if you didn't say, it must mean area. Well that's not what they meant and I got the answer wrong. I protested to the teacher, who must have thought: Here's a teaching moment. So she asked me to write a letter to the Times, which I did. She mailed it for me.

Now here's the part that taught me a lot about the Times, and how adults can be ridiculously rude to children. I remember deciding at the time to remember this so when I was an adult I would remember to treat children with respect, which I really try to do.

The Times response came to my teacher, not me. They didn't like something about how I wrote my letter. And they didn't respond to the substance of the challenge, how was a student to know the criteria for the question. I thought it was unfair to put both Alaska and California in the list of choices, without saying what the criteria was. You may think it was a small point, but I was small then, and I wanted to know.

To this day, the Times has remained consistent and so have I. They generally talk over our heads, and respond to the manner in which the challenge is raised, not to its substance. I still keep trying to find new ways to approach this. I guess what I've been trying to say to the Times since sixth grade is this -- We are real people out here. Just like you. And we're smart. So let's talk, without the attitude.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Looking back over the advance of physics over the last two hundred years, it's staggering to realize how much our world view has changed. As a science fiction writer, I'm always trying to imagine how much more things might change in the coming two centuries. The really hard thing to anticipate is the completely game-changing advances that occur every so often.

My sense is that, for one thing, we won't be using chip-based computers in two hundred years---any more than we use mechanical calculators now. That's why, in my recent novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I've been speculating about a world in which our computations escape from our machines and filter into our ordinary matter.

Nick Herbert is one of my favorite offbeat physicists. One of his papers in particular is something I've thought about a lot over the years: "Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra." Here Nick argues that our conscious minds display some of the same features as quantum mechanics. When we're not thinking about anything in particular, our thoughts evolve in a continuous, multi-universe kind of way---but when we focus on something, we carry out something like the quantum collapse that characterizes the process of measurement.

[Brain models from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.]

As I've been saying, I think it's at least in principle possible that the quantum computations in ordinary matter might be capable of carrying out these same kinds of processes---which we normally associate with living, conscious minds. And Nick's paper helps you to think about this idea.

David Deutsch wrote a deep and technical paper about the topic of computation in arbitrary pieces of matter, called "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer."

The basic idea is that quantum mechanical systems can act as universal computers, and it's generally believed that any universal computer can emulate a human mind (given the right program, and, aye, there's the rub).

One of our big problems is that we still have such an imperfect notion of how to build a software system that's like a human mind. The best idea along these lines that I've seen in the last few years is in the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

Two more rich sources for futuristic ideas.

(1) The arXiv.org site---for instance look at their New Papers on Cosmology and Extragalactic Physics page. It blows my mind that you can so easily access all these wild new papers, easily readable in PDF form. Even if, for the average person, a lot of the writing is incomprehensible gibberish (like the backwards neon sign shown above), you can skate through and pick up some great concepts and buzzwords.

(2) The physicist John Baez's pages. Baez is a deep thinker and a gifted popularizer, adept at imparting the true strangeness of this world.

It's liberating to realize that, as always, we're very much on the edge of knowing what's really going on.

Patrick sez, "A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won."

Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.

Security guards didn't find any video equipment in the family's bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.

"They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter," Lurie said.

"Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession."

Cinema ordered to pay $10K in damages for search (Thanks, Patrick!)

Threadbanger hosts Rob and Corinne will be at Maker Faire this weekend, and are hosting a Twitter-based scavenger hunt with an opportunity to get into the Faire for free and with a Threadbanger-branded Janome sewing machine as the grand prize. Fans of ThreadBanger's weekly DIY shows can join in and start finding scavenger hunt clues by following ThreadBanger on Twitter.

The first ten people to arrive on Sunday, May 31st at Maker Faire's Will Call table with the secret password, which will be revealed via ThreadBanger's twitter account, will receive a free ticket to the event and the next clue to continue the hunt. The first two people to arrive will also receive a brand new Kodak Camera. Prizes will be given at each checkpoint with the grand prize being a ThreadBanger-branded Janome sewing machine. Other partners in the contest include Coats and Clark thread company, Simplicity Patterns, Generation-T, Make Magazine, O'Reilly Media and Yudu Personal Screen Printing. The scavenger hunt will take tweeps through some of Maker Faire's best stops. Along the way, participants will pick up new clues by tweeting passwords to @Threadbanger while collecting craft-happy prizes from selected stops. Those who finish the hunt successfully will get to compete for the grand prize: a brand new Threadbanger-branded Janome sewing machine.

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FyreWyr writes "L0phtCrack — now 12 years old — used to be a security 'tool of choice' for black hats, pen-testers, and security auditors alike — that is, until it was sold by L0pht to @stake, then Symantec, to be released and subsequently dropped as LC 5. As an IT security consultant, I used this tool to regularly expose vulnerabilities or recover data when there were few other options available. Eventually, I let it go as tech evolved away. Now, after being returned to its original developers, version 6 was released this week with fresh features: support for 64-bit multiprocessors, (current) Unix and Windows operating systems, and a number of other features, including enhanced handling of NTLM password hashes and support for rainbow tables. Interested parties, especially consultants, will find this shiny new version sports a hefty price tag. It raises doubts in my mind whether it can effectively compete with open source alternatives that go by similar names, but as I found earlier versions so useful, its re-emergence seems worth the mention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoundArts has an interactive "musical petting zoo" for people to experiment with and create some music. They were set up for Eduction Day, and will be at Maker Faire all weekend. Come check them out!

Sound Arts is a multi faceted sound studio, created to serve corporate, advertising, and educational clients as well as a diverse community of musicians, filmmakers, and theater artists. With our outstanding network of producers, teachers, and artists, Sound Arts does all aspects of audio production, educates and connects the creative community, and provides a variety of multimedia and sound solutions that achieve both technical and artistic excellence.

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A lot of change is coming in the Rebooting The News podcast series.

The last episode was so good, it seemed a shame there wasn't a site specifically for the podcast. So I bought a domain and spent a couple of days creating a site for it. (Along the way creating some interesting new desktop software for managing podcasts.)

http://rebootnews.com/

There's a new feed just for RTN podcasts.

http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml

They will continue to appear in the Scripting News feed, so if you're subscribed to that, no need to change anything.

I also made a package of the first ten episodes and uploaded a torrent to Mininova.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891

So if you've missed any episodes, or would just like to have a complete collection through last week, please go get it. BitTorrent is such a rational way to distribute content, and it's under attack by the entertainment industry. This is a perfect non-infringing application of BT, Jay and I want you to have our recordings, so go get em!

If you're new to BitTorrent, it's really easy. On the Mac, I recommend Transmission and on Windows, I use uTorrent. Just follow the instructions on the site to install, then click on the mininova.org link above and click on OK to the prompts that appear. It may take an hour or two to get all 135MB, so just leave it running in the background. Once it's finished, leave it running a little longer so that the next people can download it from you. It's a peer-to-peer system.

And don't worry -- I'm allowed to do this -- I created the podcasts (along with Jay).

dr_dracula writes "Earlier this year, the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that some applications, such as KDE, were at risk of losing files when used on top of ext4. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3-specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 are about whether the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLoS ONE where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once — a serious form of misconduct by any standard — and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. 'Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct,' writes Fanelli. 'It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bughunter writes "Cnet is reporting that Mac clone maker Quo Computer plans to open its first retail location, selling Mac clones, on June 1st. To start, Quo will offer three desktop systems: the Life Q, Pro Q, and Max Q. While details of the components are not yet available, founder Rashantha De Silva said they are looking at Apple's system configurations for guidance. Pricing has also not been finalized on the desktop machines, but the company is looking to start pricing at less than $900. While Quo is starting off with the desktop machines, De Silva said it is looking at offering an Apple TV-like media server and a smaller computer similar to the Mac Mini. He acknowledges that Quo will likely face opposition from Apple, much like Psystar. 'They probably will (sue us),' De Silva said. 'There are others doing this, but we have a different attitude. There are thousands of people in the "Hackintosh" market, but many of them are creating bad products. I don't think anyone wins in that environment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the most excellent Pseudopod horror podcast, David Nickle's fantastic story "The Inevitability of Earth," a tale about the ignobility of those who would fly:

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing -- flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beak-ish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather's apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone -

And so was Grandfather.

Dave's got a new short story collection coming soon, available for pre-order: Monstrous Affections.

Pseudopod 144: The Inevitability of Earth

MP3 Link

Pseudopod podcast feed

ericatcw writes "It was reported last week that Microsoft had cut access to its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service to citizens of five countries with whom the US has trade embargoes. Now, it turns out that Google and, apparently, AOL have taken similar actions. According to a lawyer quoted by Computerworld, even free, downloaded apps are viewed as 'exports' by the US government — meaning totally in-the-cloud services such as e-mail may escape the rules. Either way, there appear to be a number of ways determined citizens of Syria, Iran, and Cuba can get around the ban."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Great Frog's Michael Mouse Ring is a sweet chunk of chunky, infringing silver: a skull in Mickey ears.

Michael Mouse Ring

MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MOTO Labs will be unveiling their "DIY Android Home Energy Monitor" today at Maker Faire. MOTO's Daniell Hebert will be giving a talk, "Android Beyond the Phone," at 3:30pm Sunday, on the main stage. The MOTO Labs booth is 113 in Expo Hall.

So what is the AHEM?

The MOTO DIY Android Home Energy Monitor (AHEM) utilizes an average wireless network. Wireless webcams take pictures of the ever-changing dials on the user's utility meters. A BeagleBoard running Android and the MOTO AHEM custom applications push the pictures up to a Flickr photo set.

MOTO AHEM application prompts and transcribes numbers into your Flickr image tag. Saving the image spurs the MOTO Labs' Google Gadget to automatically chart meter activity on the user's Google home page.

More information can be found here on their website.

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snydeq writes "Google will add scripting capabilities to Google Docs, allowing organizations to customize its online applications and automate tasks. Google plans to sign up about 1,000 customers over the next few weeks to test the feature, called Google Apps Script. It will be tested initially in Google Spreadsheets and extended to other Google Docs applications over time. The company isn't saying yet when Apps Script — which is based on JavaScript with object-based extensions added by Google — will be widely available. Google Docs users can already apply to try it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday was Education Day at Maker Faire. While makers were busy setting up their booths, and the Maker Shed was being stocked, groups of students came through the Maker Faire site for workshops and to see the whole weekend preparation come together.

Teachers, parents and students all came see great projects, try their hand at building and crafting and meet the people who make things for their passion. At the beginning of the day, there were a lot of empty booth spaces, as teh day went on, makers, exhibitors and vendors filled up their real estate with projects, set up demonstration spaces and got their equipment out of the boxes and up and running.

If you came to education day, tell us about what you saw, what you did and what most impressed you.

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Media literacy is an expanded information and communication skill that is responsive to the changing nature of information in our society. It addresses the skills students need to be taught in school, the competencies citizens must have as we consume information in our homes and living rooms, and the abilities workers must have as we move toward the 21st century and the challenges of a global economy. (Source: Telemedium)

Photo credit: Tag Crowd Inside this Media Literacy Digest:

• Will Higher Education Be The Next Bubble To Burst? - According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent
• Rapid Internet Justice - We are re-creating our physical societal rules for the online environment. The ideals that should serve as a foundation are not yet defined…
• Technology For Teaching and Learning Transformation - George Siemens conducted with Kathleen Matheos a two-day workshop on Technology for teaching and learning transformation
• Challenges Faced by African Universities In Technology Integration - ...thoughts / comments from a workshop and discussion session with leaders in education and ICT from African universities
• African Elections - Technology, reflected in sites like African Elections, provides individuals with access to needed information and conversations. Controlling this information is increasingly difficult.

This weekly digest takes you to places, facts and resources that help you make greater sense of the increasing relevance that new technologies and media are having on the way you learn. Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

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

Will Higher Education Be The Next Bubble To Burst?

Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst? asks:

According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent - more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care. Patrick M. Callan, the center’s president, has warned that low-income students will find college unaffordable.

Laying aside the obvious point that education is already unaffordable for much of the work, this article explores challenges education faces in light of recent “bubble bursts”. I’m interested in the new value point for higher education. The system currently serves three dominant roles:

• content / research,
• teaching / learning,
• and accreditation.

Why don’t we split them up? We could serve each function better in this model. And less expensively. A large system that tries to do too much is incapable of adapting rapidly to changing external conditions.

Rapid Internet Justice

An interesting thread about Rapid Internet Justice. Short version: someone uses online forums to target people to steal auto parts. The community serves as detective and solves the case. In this instance, it appears the right person is identified, but I’ve also seen online communities exhibit “mob mentality”. This story has a strong positive message - the ability of a community to do the detective work police were not able to do (or interested in doing). On the negative side: the checks (or is it cheques? :)) and balances that form established societies are lacking. We are re-creating our physical societal rules for the online environment. The ideals that should serve as a foundation are not yet defined…

Technology For Teaching and Learning Transformation

If you’ve been following my twitter feeds (and personal tag for travelling - #whine09), you’re aware that I’m in Senegal (minus luggage). I conducted - with Kathleen Matheos - a two-day workshop on Technology for teaching and learning transformation. I’ve posted the slides from day 2 of the workshop.

Challenges Faced by African Universities In Technology Integration

I’ve captured a few thoughts / comments from a workshop and discussion session with leaders in education and ICT from African universities: Challenges faced by African Universities in technology integration. I’m continuing my quest to use more images. But, as the post reveals, visuals truly are not my strength :).

African Elections

Ideologies are embedded into technology. Ideologies, of course, are about power, control, and ways of looking at the world. As such, it’s fair to say that technology is about power - who can create? Who has access? Today, in a conversation with an African colleague - Ben Akoh - I was introduced to the African Elections site. The site tracks and shares election news / conversation in various social media (Twitter, SMS, blogs, etc.) and traditional media sites. I recall watching an election for the premier of Manitoba in early 2000’s. I didn’t have access to a television, but watched a postage stamp-sized jittery newscast. It was terrible by today’s online video standards. But it gave me what I wanted most: timely access to information that I found important. Technology, reflected in sites like African Elections, provides individuals with access to needed information and conversations. Controlling this information is increasingly difficult. A daily newspaper is much easier to shut down than a distributed conversation. Yes, I know countries can block sites and restrict traffic. But democracy is far more secure when subject to the input of many commentators than to a select few mainstream media sources.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on May 30th 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: Will Higher Education Be The Next Bubble To Burst? - Paul Fleet Rapid Internet Justice - Tom Schmucker Challenges Faced by African Universities In Technology Integration - Pop!Tech

Among the free papercraft downloads at Canon's website is this beautiful model of the structure of the sun -- a perfect project for a sunny weekend!

Structure of the Sun (via Make)

I always enjoy riding my bicycle in new places, so I was very excited to hear that a bunch of makers will be riding to the San Mateo County Fairgrounds in the morning.

Join the ride from Dolores Park with the Rock The Bike crew and other two-wheeled enthusiasts. I'll be riding into town to help guide the group down to the Faire on the coastal route.

You can alternately follow the Rock The Bike route.

There is a $10 discount for attendees arriving by bicycle, and there is a bicycle valet to lavish your bicycle with love while you enjoy the festivities.

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A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens, torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation, as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours, while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and what it got, no one trusts):

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures..."

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda -- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Cookies, not torture, convinced al Qaeda suspect to talk, FBI interrogator says (Thanks, Mark!)

Ben sez, "A film from the 1939 World's Fair showing a Chrysler being built in Stop Action animation. Originally filmed in 'Three-Dimensional Polaroid Film.'"

Man, this thing has got it all: golden age World's Fair, that fantastic chipper music, dancing brightly colored machine-parts... I want to crawl in and nestle among the sparkplugs.

Exclusive: Chrysler Builds a Car (Thanks, Ben!)

archatheist writes "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have engineered a mouse whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for a different (human) version. This is interesting because the gene is implicated in human language, and this has changed how mice squeak. 'In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives.' The academic paper was published in Cell."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has a bunch of free papercraft models available, including this awesome sun papercraft. Via New World Geek.

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It's no secret that those of us who have been in favor of pushing back against the worst abuses of intellectual property law have been disappointed by the Obama administration -- which brought in a number of entertainment industry lawyers and seemed to side with IP holders over the public at almost every turn... until now. We've talked about the importance of the lawsuit over Cablevision's remote DVR system, and whether it represented copyright infringement. The appeals court had ruled that just because the DVR was hosted at Cablevision's datacenter instead of in a house it wasn't infringement. This makes perfect sense. Yet the entertainment industry has been claiming that allowing Cablevision to host DVRs on its own premise is infringement and Cablevision has to pay extra for the right to offer the same exact TiVo-type service that anyone can use in their home. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the new Solicitor General to weigh in. At the time, we noted that this could be a good thing, since one of the last things Solicitor General Elena Kagan did before leaving Harvard to join the administration was recruit Larry Lessig to Harvard.

And, indeed, it appears that Kagan has not succumbed to entertainment industry's tortured logic on this issue and has recommended that the Supreme Court not take the case, saying that the appeals court ruling reasonably resolved the issues in the case. Either way, it's nice to see that the administration hasn't been totally taken over by those who believe in twisting copyright law to protect obsolete business models.

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Yesterday, Sony Online Entertainment representative Daniel Myers announced that The Matrix Online will be shut down on July 31st. The game launched in 2005 after several delays and false starts, and shortly thereafter SOE bought the rights to operate the game from developer Monolith. Now, four years later, the game will join the ranks of closed MMOs. In a forum post, Myers said, "The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won't be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It'll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone's RSI just one more time?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks back, Dennis wrote about a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about innovation, but I was just shown another article from the same issue, by Adam Gropnik, which may be even more interesting. Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention," by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you're just focused on getting through the day. You don't have time to experiment and try to improve things -- you make do with what you have. It's in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.

This makes a lot of sense... and certainly fits with plenty of other things we've seen in recent research. Innovation tends to occur not because of one brilliant idea from one brilliant individual -- but as an ongoing process, with lots of folks tossing different ideas at the wall, and seeing what sticks. Invention is the beginning process, but then people innovate around various inventions to improve it and make it acceptable to the market. In fact, this is why we tend to think that the long run impact of investment bubbles isn't usually bad. Historically, the impact of bubbles has actually been quite good, and it's for exactly these reasons. Within the bubble there is tremendous abundance, and that allows for many different ideas to get tested incredibly quickly. The bad ones fail, but plenty of good ideas (and infrastructure) stick around. It's bad if you get caught up in the investment bubble, but it's good for the overall economy in the long run.

This also should (again) get people to rethink some issues surrounding patents. If it's that abundance and experimenting that leads to all that innovation, aren't we holding back that innovation by enforcing artificial scarcity, and allowing one company to entirely block others from doing the necessary experiments? In Chris Anderson's latest book, he builds on Carver Mead's idea about transistors becoming so abundant that it makes sense to "waste" them. This makes a tremendous amount of sense if you start to follow through the economic implications of "wasting" goods that are effectively infinite. When "wasted," they create new opportunities where none existed before. The innovation that comes out of abundance comes from such "waste." It comes from the ability to invent and tinker and experiment and see what sticks -- and you can't do that when you have massive scarcities -- real or artificial. So why is it that our innovation policy is still focused on enforcing scarcities when that's the exact opposite of what's needed to encourage innovation?

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We've discussed recently some of the basic conflicts between the First Amendment and copyright law. The First Amendment, of course, bars Congress from making any law that restricts the freedom of speech, and copyright law does, in many ways, restrict the use of speech. I'm going to have much more to say on this issue shortly, but Michael Scott recently pointed us to a related issue, about how the ongoing attempts of the US to push China into implementing stricter copyright law, which may actually aid the Chinese government in stamping out political dissent (something that the US also claims it's against). The article discusses how western nations have often explained away the conflict between copyright and free speech: a clear distinction between idea and expression (though, many question this) and a strong fair use defense. However, the article points out that the way China is looking at copyright laws, these don't appear to be much of a factor. Now, the Chinese government certainly doesn't care, as they've never been big advocates of free speech. But, for the US, policymakers should be aware that in pushing for stronger copyright enforcement, they may be handing the gov't a tool to crack down on dissent and free speech.

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Chabil Ha' writes "Heard the rumors that the much-maligned Windows 7 Starter Edition would be able to run more than three concurrent applications? Today, the Windows team made it official: 'Based on the feedback we've received from partners and customers asking us to enable a richer small notebook PC experience with Windows 7 Starter, we've decided to enable Windows 7 Starter customers the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like, instead of being constricted to the 3 application limit that the previous Starter editions included. We believe these changes will make Windows 7 Starter an even more attractive option for customers who want a small notebook PC for very basic tasks, like browsing the web, checking email and personal productivity.' Small consolation, of course, if you want to watch a DVD natively, but I'm sure this won't stop the Slashdot crowd from enabling it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past how locksmiths are apparently upset that geeks online have revealed that lockpicking is really easy, but it's not just the locksmiths. It's the lock makers themselves. Wired has a fascinating article about one of the world's most well known lock picker, who makes it a practice to publicly expose how vulnerable certain locks are. Not so long ago, he and a colleague figured out how to quickly open Medeco locks, which many had considered to be the most secure locks of all -- and are used all over the world in gov't high security buildings. So how has Medeco responded? Basically by trying to ignore the guy... then to insult him and then to discount what he clearly has done. It's just like software companies who try to deny software vulnerabilities, except that it's much easier to patch some software that to patch a vulnerable lock. While many in the lock world are apparently pissed off at this guy, Marc Weber Tobias, they should be happy that he's making sure the locks are really secure. Because, you can pretty much be assured that he's not the only one doing all of this -- but the others who are figuring it out aren't talking about it, but are using the knowledge to their own advantage.

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I wasn't at Maker Faire setup day for more than a few minutes before I ran into Limor Freid of Adafruit awesomness and Windell Oskay of Evil Mad Scientist Labs, well, evilness. I'm honored to have received from each of them truly unique and wonderful calling cards.

These are quite a bit more functional than your average card. Limor's is a working Spirograph with bonus rulers at the edges. EMSL's is a Tiny 2313 prototyping board. I was hoping to declare a winner on Sunday of Bestest Maker Faire Calling Card, but may need to chicken out and have winners both in the Mechanical and Electronic divisions! Anyone else done up a super rad card?

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For years and years and years, the Australian government has been looking to come up with a rationale for censoring the internet. The most recent plan has gone through some hiccups with mass protests. But, of course, the gov't has continued to push on, claiming that such a censored blacklist is important to stop child porn. Except... a few months back, the censored list was leaked, and a review of the list now shows that less than 32% of the sites were actually about child porn (via Michael Scott).

This is one of the (many) reasons why such secret blacklists are always a bad idea. Given the opportunity to censor content, it's too tempting not to expand the list with general stuff the censors "don't like" rather than the actual intended purpose of the list. And that, of course, is why gov'ts always insist that such lists should be secret rather than publicly reviewable. Of course, it's worth noting that as part of the admission that the list has such a small percentage of what was supposed to make up the entire list, the Australian government says that it's having the police look into the leak of the list. Why? The only thing the leak exposed was how the gov't was lying to the public. That shouldn't be illegal. That should be welcomed whistle-blowing of gov't abuse.

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ausekilis writes "Many outlets are reporting that Time Warner has confirmed plans to spin off AOL. All that's left to deal with are a few financial hurdles, such as buying out Google's 5% stake in AOL. The interesting part of the story is that both AOL's CEO and Time Warner's CEO said effectively the same thing, that AOL will be better off as an independent unit, as opposed to 'a cog in the Time Warner wheel.' Interesting to note that when they originally merged, the idea was for AOL to be a one-stop shop for all your internet goods. Makes you wonder what would have happened if Time Warner had invested in AOL as an exclusive media outlet for movies, TV, music, etc. Perhaps AOL would have regained some speed and become the prominent household name it once was, instead of being that company who sent us all the free coasters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dasButcher writes "President Obama is expected to name a new cybersecurity czar sometime soon. This person will be charged with defending the digital boards from attack by hostile nation-states and terrorist organizations. But the question Larry Walsh asks is: Who really wants the job? The previous three people who held the post barely made a dent in solving the security problems. Government bureaucracy and private sector resistance make it nearly impossible to find any measure of meaningful success in this job, he writes." Reader eatcajun contributes a related link to the long-awaited US cyberspace policy review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been seeing a growing realization about the clear conflicts between copyright and freedom of expression -- an issue that has often been brushed aside, but in a world where nearly all communication suddenly is covered by copyright, it becomes a much bigger issue. Michael Scott points us to a UK-based study that doesn't focus on copyright and free expression specifically, but on DRM and how it limits free expression in the UK. While this may not seem directly relevant to copyright law, it absolutely is, especially with the push for global laws that make any circumvention of DRM -- even if for legal uses -- illegal. As such, DRM that prevents freedom of expression is using copyright law to back that up, which can be a violation of First Amendment rights (yes, I recognize the First Amendment is a US issue, and this study is in the UK, but it's likely the results of the study apply to the US as well).

The study says that there hasn't been a catastrophic blockage of free expression, but clearly some had occurred, even though technology measures could have allowed the expression without seriously compromising the purpose of the DRM. More importantly, the study found that those who were stymied from performing legal expression due to DRM rarely used mechanisms provided by UK law to complain. This isn't that surprising, but it does make an important point: gov't officials are probably unaware of how much legal activity is stifled due to DRM, backed via gov't enforcement of copyright laws. While there are many other areas of study to be done around these issues, this is a worthwhile study in looking at how copyright and free expression can conflict.

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Before people came in for Education Day at Maker Faire, I had a chance to talk with Collin Cunningham about the projects he has build and is showing in the Maker Shed.

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I think it's self-evident that there is a lot of value in being on Twitter's Suggested User List, especially for publications that run ads on the pages they link to from posts to Twitter. And many of the most-followed Twitter users do that. You can see that if you look at the main 100TWT site, the posts of the 100 most popular Twitter users.

http://100TWT.com/

I wrote this app so I could get a sense of how these feeds were being used. Some even run outright ads in their feeds, not links to pages that have ads. AdventureGirl, with 493K followers, is an excellent example.

Jacob Harris, a systems guy at the NY Times, wonders if being on the SUL is like being linked to. I don't think so. There is no web equivalent to the SUL. It's as if Google seeded their search engine so that every web newbie, when they searched for anything, got 20 of 200 sites in every response. There would be no correlation between the sites returned and the query. Further, the power of these initial sites in recommending other sites would be almost absolute. New users wouldn't have any other way to find things on the web other than the first few sites they got in their very first Google search. It's so out-there that it's hard to even explain, the web could never have worked that way, people simply wouldn't have gotten the point.

Another experiment would be to walk around the office at the NYT and as every Twitter user if they would mind having more followers. Don't say why you're asking, just ask. If they all say they don't care how many people follow them, I'll buy every one of them a bagel next time I'm in NY.

I couldn't discuss this on Twitter because there's no way to explore any subtle subject 140 characters at a time. But I'm willing to discuss it here, as long as we're uncovering new ideas, and not rehashing stuff.

Over at Playboy.com, the inimitable Jack Boulware surveys the greatest of the military rock bands. Some are "official" while others, called "kix bands" by the Navy, are in it just for the, er, kicks. From Playboy.com:

Hang Ten aka US Navy Pacific Fleet Rock Band

Based at: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Members: Nine

Official Description: “An extensive repertoire encompassing popular music from the 1960's to today's latest hits…everything from rock and pop to disco and light jazz”

Playlist: Guns N’ Roses, Gwen Stefani, Bob Marley

Original Songs: None listed

Bonus: Navy publicity requested control and approval over this story!

"Battle of the Battle Bands"

miller60 writes "Many companies have saved money by leasing wholesale 'plug and play' data center space instead of building their own facilities. But the credit crunch has slowed the construction of new data centers, and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply. The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just in time for the Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, my Institute for the Future colleague Alex Pang wrote a fascinating essay about tinkering. I love the word "tinker." Back in Cincinnati, my oldest brother Mark, a lifelong maker who is now a research scientist and physician, spent his teen years digging around in an electronics hobbyist supply shop called The Tinker where resistors and capacitors were sold by the pound. From Vodafone Receiver:

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

What is tinkering? Discovering that certain snack tins can be used to make an antenna that extends the range of your wi-fi network, using electric toothbrush motors to power small robots, building a high-altitude balloon that takes video of the edge of space, are all examples of tinkering. It is technical work and a cultural attitude. Tinkering is customizing software and stuff; making new combinations of things that work better than their parts; and discovering new capabilities in or uses for existing products. Despite its fascination with things and bits, it is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users' needs.

According to MIT professor Mitch Resnick, tinkering might look at first like traditional engineering, but it is very different. Both are about designing and making things; but engineering tends to be top-down, linear, structured, abstract and rules-based - a highly formal, organized activity, meant to be carried out in (and in the service of) large organizations. Tinkering, in contrast, is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, practical and improvisational: informal and disorganized, accessible to anyone who is willing to learn (and fail) and it doesn't follow any plan too closely.

"Tinkering to the future"

05.29.09 : feline zen 2009

Sorry I'm Late is a fantastic stop-motion short film by Tomas Mankovsky. It was shot from above using a still camera. (Thanks, Carrie!)

@hellobigfoot. Usually, him one does following, but now it is your turn.

If you don't have any of the books already, do yourself a favor. If nothing else, you can use one as a shield when he sneaks into your tent and tries to make off with all your granola and bullets. Here they are:
* In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot
* Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir
* Bigfoot: I Not Dead

(Thanks, Graham Roumieu, and thanks for turning me on to the books like 5 years ago, Susannah Breslin!)

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Recently my jeweler daughter, Isabel, made me a great “Swiss Writing Knife” with symbols of seven of the things I’m interested in: A Zhabotinsky scroll (for cellular automata), the Mandelbrot set (for fractals), a robot, A Square (for the fourth dimension), Infinity, a UFO, a Cone Shell (for diving, cellular automata, universal automatism, and SF). It’s gold-colored metal and the little “blades” swing in and out, with the icons in silver-colored metal riveted on.

I tend to adjust the knife according to what kind of story or novel I'm working on, and I keep it by my keyboard as a good luck amulet, or an embodied muse.

Isabel's business, Isabel Jewelry is in Pinedale, Wyoming, and she makes most of her sales over the web. One of her customers was in fact Boing's own Cory Doctorow, who had her custom-make a pair of crypto-device wedding rings.

As a sometime zinester, Isabel has a cool drawings site as well---check out her "Get Back" story about thongs. Isabel's graphic novel, "Unfurling: The World's Longest Comic Strip," will be on display this November at the SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco, all four hundred or so feet of it!

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Much gear is currently being set up, tested, and generally readied for tomorrow's incoming crowds. Already many awesome sites to be seen around the fairgrounds. I grabbed a few pics while surveying the state of affairs - check them out for yourself in the Flickr photoset.

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Turns out you can bend lumber into some pretty amazing shapes if you first soften it by exposure to steam. Just how long it needs to "soak" in the steam varies with the species and thickness of the wood in question, but the necessary equipment is dirt cheap. This great tutorial over at the Dewalt website explains how to build a wood steaming cabinet from a few bucks worth of materials. Author, engineer, and carpenter Tony Maund says:

This entire project took about 4 hours to make and cost less than $20. This should last a number of years or more.

A piece of inexpensive, easy, homebrew equipment that will last for years and let me do amazing new things with wood? Where do I sign?

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ruphus13 writes "Amazon has been one of the early movers in the cloud computing space, with its AWS offerings, including S3 and EC2. Now, there is a lot of chatter around the imminent open sourcing of all its APIs and services and the impact that will have on the other 'clouds' out there — public or private. From the article, 'Amazon faces significant threats from open source cloud computing efforts if it pursues a purely proprietary path [...] Amazon can't ignore the cost advantages and diversity of product offerings that open source players are already offering in the cloud computing space. The company's best move is to open source its tools, which will end up diversifying them, play on a level field in terms of cost with the open source alternatives, and charge for services. Absent these moves, the company will lose potential customers to free, open source alternatives [...] Word is Amazon's legal team is currently 'investigating' open sourcing their various web services API's including EC2, S3, etc.', although these have not been confirmed by Amazon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pick The Perp is a fun site where the aim is pick the perpetrator of a crime from a line up.

"Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff's web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person's actual criminal record. "

Pick The Perp (Thanks, Steven Leckart!)

Ima Fish writes " Seattlepi.com has a posting on its blog section from "the News Chick" about how broadcast news "plagiarizes" print news. Here's the gist of the complaint:

"Print journalists consider it plagiarism. Broadcasters call it a "rewrite."

Here's how it works in nearly every news market in the country. Print reporters do research and interviews for a story that ends up being about 800 words or so. Broadcasters rewrite and condense the paper's story to around 50 words - sometimes adding their own audio or video - then present it as their own."

Condensing 800 words down to 50 words is not plagiarism, if the word "plagiarism" is to have any real meaning, of course.

The person complaining the most is Seattle's Tri-City Herald editor Ken Robertson. He's careful not to use words such as "stolen" and only goes as far as to say his stories were "lifted." Which makes sense because even he knows he has absolutely no copyright claim on the news itself. But if he knows that, exactly what is he complaining about? That he didn't get his pat on the back when an important news story got wider coverage?!

And I'm reminded of the recent postings involving Aretha Franklin and the producers of Britain's Got Talent. Franklin, the producers, and any newspaper writer got exactly what she or he bargained for. Franklin looked fashionable. The producers got paid for producing their show. And a newspaper writer got paid for writing stories. Why should they be given any credit beyond that? Franklin didn't make the hat fashionable. The producers did not make Boyle an incredible singer. And newspaper writers do not create news, they report on news. The sense of entitlement on such issues is quite bizarre."

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Many people have written to tell us about the patent infringement lawsuit that resulted in a $200 million judgement against Microsoft by a small Toronto firm called i4i. Techdirt has a line on the details of the suit where the patent in question is for "separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document." i4i argues that this covers basic XML editing to the tune of $98 per application. "It's quite troubling that doing something as simple as adding an XML editor should infringe on a patent, but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adafruit has a new posting with a link to their latest Drawdio Instructable, a new Instructables Drawdio group, and an announcement of an exhibit being mounted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. They're doing a Drawdio exhibit this summer, from July 25th to September 25th, as part of "Freeze! 2009 International MedTech Art Show." Just post your Drawdio project to the group, all submissions that have some original form factor (even superficial modifications count as original) will be included in the next Drawdio video and one entry will be chosen to be displayed in the Drawdio museum exhibit.

If you're at Maker Faire this weekend, stop by booth number 134 in Expo Hall and meet Drawdio inventor Jay Silver.

Post your Drawdio projects!

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A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of the fact that News Corps. digital media boss Jon Miller apparently said that "free doesn't work," though that isn't quite what he actually said. He said that ad-supported content doesn't work. Now, it may be true that he's making the (false) assumption that the only way to make money off of free content is advertising, but that's not the same as saying "free" doesn't work. Either way, I'd argue he's wrong. Ad supported free content has been shown for ages to work in various different ways if you do it right. Perhaps the problem is that he's not doing it right. Either way, his suggestions for where News Corp. is heading don't sound very promising:

"It's pretty clear that there has to be some recognition of value," said Jon Miller.... Miller noted that Web companies will have to figure out a way to charge consumers for content they have grown accustomed to getting for free, noting that cable television service providers learned how to charge for television shows. Miller also said he expected to see the rise of Internet micro-payments.

If there's one nearly universal truth out there, it's that you can never go back to charging for content people were used to getting for free. You may be able to charge for new content or services, but never what they're already used to getting for free.

But the real root of the problem is Miller's opening statement. That there needs "to be some recognition of value." There is a recognition of value. Otherwise people wouldn't consume your content. But that doesn't mean they'll pay for it. Notice what he doesn't say. He never says that they need to give people a reason to buy. He's talking about putting up a paywall, not providing a reason to buy. That's destined to fail.

The reason that cable providers learned to charge for television shows was because there was a scarcity there... and even then there's a big push to break out of that and move to free television shows online as well. Trying to cram the internet into that dying model sounds like a terrible idea.

The most ironic thing about all of this is that, if anyone should understand all of this, it's Jon Miller. After all, he was the one who realized that AOL's walled gardens were killing the company, and put in place its strategy of opening up and going free. So now he wants to do the opposite for Fox Interactive? Good luck!

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Hugh Pickens writes "Thomas O'Toole writes that President Obama's choice for Associate Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, authored several cyberlaw opinions regarding online contracting law, domain names, and computer privacy while on the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor wrote the court's 2002 opinion in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., an important online contracting case. In Specht, the Second Circuit declined to enforce contract terms (PDF) that were available behind a hyperlink that could only be seen by scrolling down on a Web page. 'We are not persuaded that a reasonably prudent offeree in these circumstances would have known of the existence of license terms,' wrote Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor wrote an opinion in a domain name case, Storey v. Cello Holdings LLC in 2003 that held that an adverse outcome in an administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy did not preclude a later-initiated federal suit (PDF) brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In Leventhal v. Knapek, a privacy case, Judge Sotomayor wrote for the Second Circuit that New York state agency officials and investigators did not violate a state employee's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched the contents of his office computer (PDF) for evidence of unauthorized use of state equipment. While none of these cases may mean much as far as what Judge Sotomayor will do as an Associate Supreme Court Justice 'if confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court,' writes O'Toole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Instructables, they're gearing up for their Art of Sound Contest:

Music is absolutely essential for creativity - it inspires new ideas, helps us to create and build, and provides a soundtrack for life.

That's why we've teamed up with Zalytron, Create Digital Music, and Bleep Labs to bring you the Art of Sound Contest. Show us something amazing and music-related, and win an awesome set of hand-built custom speakers or a musical instrument kit!

This contest is open to any project that creates something beautiful with or around sound. Whether you're into homemade/modified instruments, circuit-bending, speakers, sound activation, or anything else, this contest is for you. Simply create, modify, actuate, craft, decorate, enhance, display, amplify, or visualize sound, and tell us how and why you did it. It can be your take on a classic project, or something entirely new and unique - it's up to you!

Now show us your original instrument, your tricked-out subwoofer, or your sound-responsive wall of LEDs! Be thorough, and document your project well so others can follow in your footsteps. Share your skills and experience to help inspire others, expand the possibilities of both sound and art, and win some fabulous prizes!

Enter for your chance to win one of the speaker sets above, plus more prizes!

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