I spent Monday at the wonderful SanFran MusicTech Summit and I have to admit that I came away quite optimistic. You may recall earlier this year that my takeaway from MidemNet was how optimistic people were becoming -- but how much the old school industry folks then took that optimism and twisted it into something bad (saying things like "we have to stop treating our fans as criminals, but we need to stomp out piracy at any cost!"). In contrast, I have to say that after the SF MusicTech event, I'm back to the optimistic viewpoint, though I recognize there's still plenty of shaking out to occur.

Terry McBride, whose insights always are worth thinking deeply about, made a comment that this was "the last chance for the music industry" to stop screwing things up and pissing off customers, and that it was time to get it right: meaning stop treating customers as criminals, stop focusing on the sale of things that people don't want to pay for and stop worrying about copyright (he even agreed with David Bowie's comment that copyright was over). I agree with much of what McBride said, with one exception: this isn't the last chance for the music industry. The music industry is doing great -- with more music than ever before being produced and available to fans, and more musicians than ever before being able to connect directly with fans and put in place a business model that works for them, instead of getting worked over by a major label with a dreadful contract. Instead, I'd argue that it's the major labels who have one more chance... and even that may be iffy given how badly they've screwed some stuff up in the past decade.

But much of the rest of the event showed why there's so much reason for optimism. There are so many different startups entering the space these days that it's honestly difficult to keep track of them. And while the market is certainly confusing, we'll start to see some clear leaders shake out of the pack in the next few years. But, combine it all and these startups provide all of the tools that any musician today needs to record, perform, build a fan base, manage a fan base, tour, manage a tour, connect with fans, communicate with fans, transact with fans, promote, distribute, analyze and share. Basically, absolutely everything that you used to need a record label for is showing up from a hodge podge of startups. They don't all necessarily work well or work together, but that'll change over time. On top of this, there are additional tools that let you do things that simply weren't possible before, such as providing better, more detailed recommendation systems and analytics. Among the cool or compelling companies I saw or spoke with at the event were Band Metrics, Topspin, Bandize, 100000Fans, Instinctiv, Jamendo, Drop.io, thesixtyone... and those were just the ones that I'm remembering off the top of my head. There were at least two dozen other interesting startups as well.

Again, this doesn't mean there's no room for a label anymore -- but the role of that label changes. Some bands won't need labels at all, and will be able to manage everything themselves using these tools and services. Others will rely on label reps to help piece all of the different services together, so they can focus on the music. But the routes around the old system are growing at a phenomenal rate. On top of that, there were some major label representatives who actually seem to recognize all of this, even if not all of their colleagues agree.

So while I am still nervous about what the old guard and its lobbyists will do to laws around the globe, the next generation is clearly growing up from below. It's quite messy right now, but it's coming. Fast.

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In the mid-90s a book of homebrew musical instrument projects was published called Sound Designs, by John Scoville. Amongst the scores of awesome ideas within, the book suggests making hanging bells by cutting apart discarded gas bottles. There's surprisingly little information about this trick on the web. This page, though an oldie, is still a goodie. The author discusses the tricks for cutting the bottles and the resulting tones from several bells. You can even listen to what they sound like.

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Yahoo! is launching a new program, in search of innovative and environmentally-conscious products to bring to market. They write:

Make It Green is turning great ideas that improve lives and help our planet into actual products. We're looking for the best green do-it-yourself ideas -- and we need you to help us. Submit your idea, and if it's chosen, you could see your product on store shelves, get your cut of the green in royalties, and possibly appear on the Everyday Edison's TV show.

Check out the Idea Gallery to see what projects people are submitting. You can give "thumbs up" votes to your favorites to help them decide which ideas might be worthwhile products.

Luke Iseman, former Make: Online contributor, and author of the Garduino project in MAKE, Volume 18, has this computer-controlled "plantsitter" featured as one of the projects on the site. Way to go, Luke!

Make It Green will also be at Maker Faire showcasing various projects, including Luke's.

Make It Green

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During my six-odd years as a graduate organic chemist, probably the cheapest, most powerful, and most commonly used analytical laboratory technique in my bag of tricks was thin-layer chromatography. Explaining chromatography theory is a big job, but the idea boils down pretty well to this: chromatography is the art of taking a complex mixture with all sorts of compounds in it and separating them out one at a time.

There are a couple of reasons you might want to do this: First, because you only want one of those compounds and need to purify it by getting rid of the rest. This is called "preparative" chromatography and it is a complex and relatively expensive endeavor. But the other common reason for performing separations is analytical: You want to get an idea of how many compounds are in there and whether or not one of them is compound "X." Thin-layer chromatography lets you do this, on a bench-top, with a few cents worth of materials and a few minutes of time. It's unbelievably powerful for such an inexpensive technique, and Science Project Lab has a great tutorial on getting started at home.

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thinker sends in an MSNBC report on the development of ethical guidelines for battlefield robots. The article notes that such robots won't go autonomous for a while yet, and that the guidelines are being drawn up for relatively uncomplicated situations — such as a war zone from which all non-combatents have already fled, so that anybody who shoots at you is a legitimate target. "Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own? Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an 'ethical governor,' a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, comes out this month."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, you can read about:

*A fossilized stack of floppy disks;

*Big-ass light bulbs;

*The Face Bank loses its creepy eyes;

*A washing machine for dogs;

*Joel's take on the Myka;

*A laptop that cools itself ionically;

*the 2003 filmTom Dowd and the Magic of Music;

*Smaller, faster, cooler netbooks of the future;

*A charming netbook review by a Polish kid.

I'm no fan at all of Sarbanes-Oxley, the overly draconian corporate governance law that was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal. Obviously, given the financial messes that we're going through today, it did little to stop financial shenanigans. The reality is that the law did lots of superficial (but extremely expensive) things to basically have someone to pin the blame on, should anything go wrong -- but did little to actually prevent fraud. I'm all for good corporate governance, and efforts to root out fraud -- but Sarbanes-Oxley did no such thing. And, worse, it had pretty massive unintended consequences, such as adding millions to the cost (in pure economic waste) of going public, making it a lot trickier for startups to go public, even if they were completely ready under every other condition. Sure, we had too many IPOs during the dot com boom, but Sarbanes-Oxley made the barrier to going public much greater than it ever should be.

So, I was happy to see headlines suggesting that the Supreme Court is reviewing the law and could possibly throw it out. However, the details are a lot more mundane. Basically, some lawyers are challenging a very narrow part of the law, questioning whether or not it violates the "appointments clause" of the Constitution, which requires that certain officials be appointed by the President or a Cabinet member. So, in this case, officials to a board overseeing Sarbanes-Oxley were appointed by the SEC, rather than a cabinet level representative.

This is nothing to get worked up about.

You may recall, challenging various laws or appointments under this clause has suddenly become popular. We covered a very similar challenge to appointments to the Patent Appeals Board, as well as a similar claim about appointments to the Copyright Royalty Board (and it also came up as an issue during the debate over the TARP program. Of course, with the Patent Appeals Board, all it took was for Congress to make a quick fix to the law, making it so that the law required the Cabinet level member to make the appointment with the "help" of the lower level director who did the original appointments. In other words, nothing really changed other than who signed the appointments.

The only potential "difference" here is that if the Supreme Court sides with those saying this rule is unconstitutional, the entire Sarbanes-Oxley would need to be put back to a vote with any changes, and the thought is that this could open up the law to be fixed. Of course, that may be wishful thinking, as it would also open up the law to be made much, much worse -- and given the populist attacks on corporate governance and corporate malfeasance these days, it seems quite likely that what comes out would be much, much worse in terms of impact... but any oversight board would be appointed at the cabinet level.

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In Bb 2.0 is collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon. People are encouraged to participate and send in their own videos.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.

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Nerdposeur points out that Cory Doctorow has a compelling piece in The Guardian today, arguing that network neutrality is not only crucial for the future of the Internet, but is what the ISPs owe to the public. He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?" "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day... If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work — give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."

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.)

There's a great show at the SFMOMA now, showing all 84 prints from Robert Frank's classic mid-1950s photo book The Americans, along with some outtakes, such as the image shown above---which is not in the book.

The reason the image above looks funky is because it's my photo of Frank's casual working print that's glued to a wall at the show with a bunch of others. More outtakes can be found in Looking In, the catalog for the show, which also includes all the prints from The Americans---but I'd say the print quality of the images in the catalog isn't as good as in the book, although the catalog does have a lot of interesting essays.

I've had a copy of The Americans for years, and I study it fairly often. So it was almost dizzying to see the book's 84 pictures on the walls, in order---it was like getting inside this world at last.

[This is one of the Americans photos on display]

Another cool thing about the show is that they have, like I said, a wall of these working prints of Robert Frank's outtakes for the book, all curly-edged, as if still in Frank's studio. He took some 20,000 photos while driving in a huge loop around the US, then printed the 1,000 pictures that he liked best, and then winnowed those down to the final 84.

I grabbed shots of two of the outtakes for this post. I like the waiting-room scene at the start of this post, the languid curve of the woman's hand, and it's cool that these aren't models, they're just people hanging out. Women actually wore hats like that in the 1950s, even in bus-stations!

And the outtake below shows some Buicks getting unloaded and, in the background, on the billboard, a guy with a moose.

From Jack Kerouac's introduction to The Americans:

Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a big sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank with the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

Odd list of swimming pool rules. I guess the last one makes sense though - some people may think the other rules ensure that the water is safe for drinking. Pool rules

Technology loops, it follows a pattern that repeats, and we're in one of those loops right now.

Here's how it goes.

1. Something new comes along.

2. We all use one company's product because we need it simplified. I think of this as the "training wheels" phase. Not the full-power version of the technology, but a simplified one, easy to learn on.

3. Two forces oppose each other as the technology becomes familiar and popular. The company tries to build their lockin as the users crave more power. Even if the company didn't try to foreclose, eventually the users would break out because you can only get so much power from one vendor (strategy taxes and conflicts of interests rule, not maximum power for users).

4. Break out! Often explosive. Another huge wave of growth around the technology as the open version permeates the market.

5. Maturity. Back to step #1.

That's the loop. So many things have happened like this. A classic example -- email. In the 80s most people who used email did it on closed company-owned systems like MCI, Compuserve, AppleLink, then AOL and Microsoft's corporate servers. Then along with the rise of the web, email moved to the Internet, and mail servers became commodities. Everyone had one. Companies started out not wanting to operate their own servers, then because they weren't scared of running them, they broke out.

So then the question comes up, as we've been talking about now for years, what does the break-out from Twitter look like? We've tried a lot of theories, but today a believable scenario came from Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.

First what is Twitter? I didn't get any answers when I asked the question last week. That's new because you used to get some. Now people don't even try. Further I'm watching all the public twits from people who work at Twitter to see if they have any ideas. If they do, they're not evident in their public twitstream.

I'm thinking now that Twitter is this -- A very low ramp onto blogging, which itself was a low ramp onto publishing. I told a friend today I didn't used to think it could get any lower than blogging, but I was wrong! Twitter is lower. I think for a lot of people the breakthrough in Twitter is that it makes blogging possible for them, both the reading and writing.

For a guy like me, who mastered blogging long ago, Twitter is compelling because of the people. All these new people blogging, I want to read what they write, maybe they'll come up with something! But more and more, sorry to say, I don't think they are coming up with much. I think 140 characters is really very limiting for most people. Esp when you layer all the RT's and @screennames and #hashtags and tinyurls in and on it. It's getting really crowded there in 140-character-land.

Plus if you believe the loop model, the best of the Twitter users, the ones who are doing the most interesting stuff with it, they're going to want more, soon. And they're going to also want their freedom. All of which says the investors in products like Tumblr are really smart, except they ought to offer more freedom than Twitter does and they don't appear to. It also suggests that Facebook, Movable Type and WordPress would be well-served to produce low-end products, ones that did just a little more than Twitter. The key here is to be, in every way, a Twitter clone, but relax some of the limits. I'd bet that the Twitter users are wrong about 140 characters. It may have been magic at one time, but that's the past. It would be easy to conceive of a UX that was every bit as simple as Twitter's but didn't have that limit.

Earlier today I twitted: "I like the open web so much I'm willing to accept its limits."

Then a few hours later Larry Page hinted at the explosive breakout I'm looking for. If I can write on the web, on my own server, and still have it instantly accessible to people who follow me, whether they use twitter or splitter or donder or vixen, then I've got:

1. My choice of tools.

2. My choice of servers.

3. When Twitter goes down I stay up.

4. They can be neutral or not and no one cares.

5. I'm no longer locked in.

Just one little protocol to implement it. I ping them when I update. They read the document I say changed. If it did, re-index. If it didn't, ignore the ping. That's all. Everything about Twitter reduced to a new search engine from Google, something they're good at, and small enhancement to my CMS (and to be clear, it's old tech, we've been doing this in the blogging world since 1999).

Oh happy day!

"cheesecake"

Hugh Pickens writes "The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, part of the Department of Defense, is using satellites to track the activities of drug cartels operating along the US-Mexican border. The agency is supplying photos to pinpoint Mexican narcotics operations and anticipate smuggling attempts into the United States. During a conference on border security held in Phoenix last week, Scott Zikmanis said his agency already has supplied some data to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a federal clearinghouse for investigating drug cartels. Any border-security surveillance will be done over Mexico, not the US says Zikmanis because a federal law, the Posse Comitatus Act, strictly limits US military operations on American soil unless such operations are authorized by Congress. Civil rights attorneys question the use of satellite technology in law enforcement. "We are in the midst of a really dangerous time in terms of technology,' said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. 'The idea that such a powerful tool might be turned on US citizens is really troubling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hulu, the online video site that has content from most of the major networks, has largely been an early success. While it's thrown up some barriers to users, it's done a decent job of putting attractive content in an easily accessible format, and users have flocked to it. Still, we've wondered if the site will be able to survive in the long run because of the demands of its content providers, which seem to be behind its user-unfriendly moves. To get a glimpse of the thinking that drives these actions, check out a piece over on Paidcontent called Memo To Networks Re Hulu: You're Making A Big Mistake, written by a former TV development exec. He says that giving users what they want -- in the form of Hulu -- isn't a good idea because it undermines the TV networks' brands. He uses the example of NBC, saying its value isn't its programming, but rather "the more than 70 years that it has taken the network to create expectations for generation... The years that it has taken the network to train consumers to expect a level of quality that can't be matched."

Wow. We've talked a lot before about how media companies overvalue their content and don't realize the importance of the services that distribute it, but completely ignoring the value of the content in favor of a TV network brand seems only slightly ridiculous. The guy is right in that network brands don't have any meaning any more, but it's not Hulu that did this. It was because the networks failed to keep up with changing viewer preferences and demands, and responded to the rise of the DVR and other new technologies with attempts to set up obstacles, rather than innovation. Viewers' loyalties now lie with individual shows, and the channel upon which they're transmitted is meaningless. The strong brands are the shows, not the networks. People simply set their DVR to catch all the programs, or they go to Hulu, ignoring the network. Even people who watch their TV the old-fashioned way don't have much awareness or interest in the network brands, beyond the evening newscasts (maybe). The former exec's advice for networks is to keep their shows locked up on their own sites so they can "stand by their brand." But where does the brand ever deliver the value that he thinks they have? Sure, the networks can try to prop up their brands by making things more difficult for their audience online -- but they've tried that strategy, and it hasn't worked. So perhaps opening up access to their content, and getting themselves (and their brands) out of the way, is a better way forward.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Make: television and ShareBrained Technology and are excited to feature the Make: television Vending Machine at Maker Faire, May 30 and 31. Bring your USB drive (over 512mb) and download episodes Make: television using a handmade custom user interface.

Jared Boone of ShareBrained Technology along with fellow makers at Dorkbot PDX are creating an awesome jukebox-style vending machine where Maker Faire visitors can bring any USB drive (over 512mb) and choose between HD or iPod versions of ANY EPISODE of Make: television. We're super excited that Jared and the crew have taken this awesome and sometimes challenging project.

It took a while to design the user interface (big push buttons!), design a control circuit board, and set up a little Linux computer to run it all. Last weekend, we finally got to the step of building the cabinet. It doesn't look like much yet, but just wait...

Jared and the crew also asked if anyone would be willing to contribute some time or resources to the design of the machine. Anyone out with a keen eye for design who's willing to help Jared should send a note to maketelevision@makezine.com.

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theodp writes "On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted US Patent No. 7,536,726 (it was filed in 2005) for intentionally crippling the functionality of an operating system by 'making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user's ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer' until an 'agreed upon sum of money' is paid to 'unlock or otherwise make available the restricted functionality.' According to Microsoft, this solves a 'problem inherent in open architecture systems,' i.e., 'they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser.' An additional problem with open architecture systems, Microsoft explains, is that 'virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system.' Nice to see the USPTO rewarding Microsoft's eight problem-solving inventors, including Linux killer (and antelope killer) Joachim Kempin, who's been credited with getting Microsoft hauled into federal court on antitrust charges." Sounds like the mechanism by which Microsoft sells one version of Vista to all users, and lets users upgrade to higher-tier flavors of the OS after cash changes hands.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted US Patent No. 7,536,726 (it was filed in 2005) for intentionally crippling the functionality of an operating system by 'making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user's ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer' until an 'agreed upon sum of money' is paid to 'unlock or otherwise make available the restricted functionality.' According to Microsoft, this solves a 'problem inherent in open architecture systems,' i.e., 'they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser.' An additional problem with open architecture systems, Microsoft explains, is that 'virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system.' Nice to see the USPTO rewarding Microsoft's eight problem-solving inventors, including Linux killer (and antelope killer) Joachim Kempin, who's been credited with getting Microsoft hauled into federal court on antitrust charges." Sounds like the mechanism by which Microsoft sells one version of Vista to all users, and lets users upgrade to higher-tier flavors of the OS after cash changes hands.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may remember last year around this time, a district court set a totally arbitrary royalty fee that AOL, Yahoo and RealNetworks had to pay ASCAP for music streamed over their services. Reading through the details of the decision was immensely troubling, because it seemed to calculate the amounts on a somewhat meaningless formula based on taking a percentage of revenue from the companies that had absolutely nothing to do with music itself. Basically, it looked at almost any revenue that somehow sorta kinda touched on music (including search) and included that as part of the calculation process. Recently, ASCAP and Google went through a similar case in front of the same district court to determine just how much Google has to pay ASCAP for all the music streamed on YouTube. To be honest, I'm still not sure why it makes sense that Google has to pay anything for this, but that's one of the oddities of modern copyright law.

While the decision hasn't received much press attention, last week, the court ordered Google to pay $1.6 million to ASCAP (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending me the decision). The court seemed to take a "split the difference" approach, as ASCAP had asked for $12 million for all music streamed between 2005 and the end of 2008 (and another $7 million for 2009). YouTube, in response, had suggested $79,500 for 2005 through the end of 2008 and then $20,000 per quarter ongoing. The court rejected both proposals, and dinged both companies for weakly supporting their positions, or being somewhat misleading in their assertions. Google, for instance, tried to focus on the number of "music videos" as compared to the total number of videos on YouTube, though the court noted that the music videos seem to get a lot more views than many of those other videos, and it doesn't take into account the time spent viewing each video. ASCAP basically said: "just take that formula you used last year for AOL, Yahoo and Real and apply it to Google revenue."

The court, instead, went into a lengthy justification of trying to come up with a "fair" proposal, involving an awful lot of redacted information on YouTube's revenue (though... if you work through all the numbers you might be able to piece back together some revenue info) and eventually came up with $1.4 million for 2005 through 2008, and then $70,000 per month afterwards, which, when added to the additional fees this year, brought it up to $1.61 million to date (and counting). Of course, this is all supposed to be a temporary sort of thing until the two sides can work out an agreement on their own -- but given the vast differences in proposals (as the court noted, ASCAP was asking for a rate 150 times as large as YouTube's proposal), it doesn't seem like the two sides are close.

Either way, reading this ruling as well as last year's ruling shows what a total mess this process is. Basically, ASCAP gets to go in and demand cash from anyone who benefits from music anywhere, and a judge sorta randomly makes up reasons to give them cash. I know that ASCAP supporters will claim that the money is for songwriters, not the record labels, and it's important and blah blah blah. But the whole system of such collective licenses is a mess that it makes it close to impossible to do anything with music without getting yourself into a huge licensing hole. For more than a century now, Congress and the courts seem to look at every innovation and simply slap another license fee on it, and leave it to the courts to sort out any mess. All of these license fees add up to a massive tax on innovation that divert money from good business models and into the hands of collections societies, who siphon off a piece and often don't do a very good job distributing that cash. It's a massively inefficient model that's simply not needed.

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eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Google from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine, it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use and you may be held liable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ant sends us to Maximum PC for an account of the history and current state of 3D video cards (single print page). "Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today... Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgic ride you don't want to miss!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit involving John Steinbeck's heirs and their attempt to regain the copyright on his works. The specifics of the case were very, very much inside baseball, having to do with interpretations of certain changes to copyright law. The specifics aren't really worth bothering with here (though you can drill down if you want to know). The news this week was that the Supreme Court rejected the appeal by Steinbeck's heirs, meaning that the appeals court ruling stands and the heirs don't get the copyrights back. However, what struck me as most interesting was the statement those heirs released:

John Steinbeck's granddaughter, Blake Smyle said, "This is about family. My grandfather would be deeply saddened to know that his contributions are now in the hands of strangers."

Mr. Steinbeck vows to continue to seek proper delegation of his father's legacy and to press forward on behalf of the families of other authors similarly situated to his position.

"If artists and their families cannot protect their rights, then everyone will ultimately suffer."

Now... that all sounds good and righteous, but is completely misleading. After all, if copyright law hadn't been changed and copyright extended greatly, Steinbeck's works would be in the public domain by now (actually, quite some time ago). In fact, as far as Steinbeck knew, both at the time he wrote his works and at the time of his death in 1968, almost everything he wrote would be in the public domain by now (some of his later works would likely still be covered, but the vast majority would be public domain). So, I find it odd to have his heirs claiming that he'd be "deeply saddened to know that his contributions are now in the hands of strangers." After all, he would have expected exactly that. That also makes the final quote hard to square with reality as well. Steinbeck knew the deal he was making with the public domain when he wrote his works. In fact, most of his works shouldn't be protected at all any more. So how can his heirs claim that everyone will suffer if those works aren't protected?

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Rogier says: It's not every day that police officers gang up on a toy cougar and taser it into submission. Such an event ought to be commemorated, don't you think? Annually, perhaps.

From redOrbit:

Police in Michigan responding to a report of a cougar on the loose said they ended up shooting a large toy cat with a Taser stun gun.

Warren police said the 911 caller said a "huge" animal resembling "a 150-pound cat" was spotted in an old cement drainpipe in Bates Park and 10 officers were sent to the scene, WDIV-TV, Detroit, reported Monday. The officers saw the outline of the animal in the pipe and shot it with a Taser.

Rogier's proposal:

[On]nce a year, in early May, we scour our attics and thrift shops for stuffed animals, then donate them to our local police force. It's optional to dress the toys in darling prison stripes, or tie cute bandanas around their furry necks that say things like "Do Tase Me Bro."

Then, at noon-time on May 18, we all gather in the main square to applaud the line of officers proudly brandishing their batons and tasers. They get to pummel the stuffing out of the pile of toys, and send thousand of volts through those fluffy bellies — as much as they like! No holding back!

Meanwhile, I propose that a marching band alternates between renditions of, say, Elvis Presley's "Teddy Bear" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

Wherein I Propose a National Cougar Day

This laid-off fellow in Omaha, NE built himself an electric-powered motorcycle mainly out of junk. He also built a windmill and a small solar system to charge it.

Electra Green

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Jen sez, "Amusing scans and illustrations from a 1941 guide to sex. For some reason, most of the glands and body parts they illustrate look like Cthulhu monsters. There's also an amazing chart of comparative clitoris sizes, with each sample sketch life-sized but looking like Popeye chins."

So, Dr. Keller claims his images make sex better. This one shows how nerves and glands dance the maypole around the brain.

Studies in Crap Unveils Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman (Thanks, Jen!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's spotted the latest installment in Christopher Locke's Modern Fossil series: iconic modern devices recast as ancient fossils.

More Modern Fossils

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

vivian writes "Ever since 1996, when I first set eyes on a Sony GlassTron head-mounted display in Japan, I have been awaiting a lightweight, head-mounted display that actually has decent resolution and doesn't look like a brick tied to your face. The closest contender to date seems to be the WRAP 920AV from Vuzix, and they are partially transparent too, which is great, but as with every other unit I have found, they only offer video quality — 640x480. Given that there have been a number of other discussions on Slashdot, I can't be the only one here who is eagerly awaiting something that could actually be a viable alternative to a PC monitor — especially for gaming or 3d graphics work. Perhaps we could petition a manufacturer to make what we actually want? Something with a minimum of 1024x768 @30-60hz refresh, say, and capable of stereo vision. Extra karma if they incorporate head tracking."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Young says:

Back in 2007, you posted a link to the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In, where we project 16MM movies at secret locations from the sidecar of my 1977 BMW motorcycle:

The kit-built AM transmitter in the photo you posted is the MacGuffin, a secret AM transmitter in a waterproof case hidden somewhere in the area, and broadcasting around the clock. In order to find out where movies are going to be shown, you have to find the broadcast, tune in, and discover the secret access code.

This year, the audio for the AM broadcast includes a freshly-recorded cover of "Brazil", which you will probably remember as the soundtrack for the Ministry of Information in Terry Gilliam's awesome 1985 movie.

You can see the MacGuffin and hear the first bit of the secret message on the Guerilla Drive-In website.

This 1910 Gothic Revival style church in San Francisco's Mission District has been converted (tastefully, it seems!) into a 3+ bedroom home. The interior photo above is the living room. Asking price? Just under $10 million. See BB pal Koshi's Flickr set of photos inside before it was remodelled! From the listing:

Formerly the Golden Gate Lutheran Church, this stunning Gothic Revival style building is now one of the most extraordinary and largest single family homes in San Francisco. This one-of-a-kind property features an enormous living area that includes the original sanctuary with soaring, coffered and hand-painted ceilings, arched windows framing Dolores Park as well as most of the original stained glass windows, custom mahogany wood finishes, four fireplaces (2 wood-burning & 2 gas), a new chef's kitchen and a spacious dining room. The Master suite level features a marble Roman tub room, dressing room and incredible 360 degree views from the tower meditation room and deck. The home includes an expansive ground floor level that could be used as exhibition space, recording studio, gym and/or home office. There is also a garage that accommodates 4-6 cars.

Castle on the Park (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Jesse sez, "The Globe and Mail has set up a Wiki where anybody can contribute and offer their thoughts on copyright in Canada to draft a community-sourced version of a new copyright bill, as opposed to the horrible Bill C-61 that the Harper Government was trying to ram through last year. The original BIll C-61 is provided as a starting point, which 'You can use the built-in wiki tools to modify ...and add or remove whatever you think is necessary to create a piece of modern copyright legislation.' The Globe and Mail will submit the final version to Ottawa for consideration on Canada Day, July 1st."

Rewriting Canada's Copyright Law (Thanks, Jesse!)

Today during our Make editorial conference call Collin Cunningham told me that he had just gotten this flier for a pasta-filled bread bowl. I asked him to take a picture so I could share it.

Collin said, "Just in time for summer … though I may hold out for the bread-bread bowl. That 'rising-heat' effect on the Domino's Flash is making me sleepy already :("

UC Berkeley psychology professor and author of The Shangri-La Diet: No Hunger, Eat Anything, Weight-Loss Plan, has been writing about the health benefits of cultured food (see: Probiotics and Resistance to Illness, The Dose-Response Revolution and Fermented Food, How Things Begin (Japan Traditional Foods), Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection, The Good Scots Diet, and many other entries about fermented food).

In a recent post, Roberts says he thinks that the shift in the 1960s from home-made food to processed food, which has resulted in people having less bacteria in their bodies, has caused corpses to rot more slowly than they used to.

A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker. His dad had told him that when he (the dad) had entered the business, you had to work fast. Bodies would start to smell quickly. But now — around 1980 — that was no longer necessary. You could wait a lot longer before they smelled bad.

Which I take to mean that around 1980 the average old person, where this classmate came from, had a lot less bacteria in their body than around 1960.

How Fast Do We Rot?

It's well known that the FCC has long had incredibly bogus data when it comes to broadband and mobile penetration in the US. In many cases, this is due to efforts from legacy providers who don't want accurate penetration info to get out there, because that might lead the government to realize how little actual competition there is in the market. Kevin Werbach points us to the fact that it appears that when people are interested in mobile phone penetration in the US, it's not the FCC who has the data, but the Center for Disease Control (CDC), who went out and collected their own damn data because it needed to know that data to make sure its phone surveys remained accurate. It's quite telling of the state of the FCC when it's the CDC that has better data about the industry the FCC regulates.

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Ran across this post from almost a year ago, while doing a little research for a fictional case study. Not a bad little list of fonts that specifically allow @font-face embedding. Surely, there are many more. #

CNETNate writes "To advance its Street View service this summer, Google is poised to unleash the unstoppable power of human legs. Google will deploy pedal-powered tricycles — the company calls them 'Google Trikes' — mounted with 360 degree Street View cameras to map areas inaccessible by its fleet of Street View cars." The article indicates that the trikes will first see use in the UK, to map out public walking paths, but one anonymous commenter said: "This must be bogus — you are not allowed to cycle on public footpaths in the UK, I can't believe Google would have overlooked such a fundamental fact. Not to mention that the vehicle pictured wouldn't fit down most paths." PC World features the trikes in Rome.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, a lot of people hate the word "moist." They also hate "hate," "no," "like," and "impossible." This, according to an essay by Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus. From his post:

Many people feel quite strongly about moist — there's even a Facebook group called called "I HATE the word MOIST!" with more than 300 members. One Facebooker calls moist "possibly the worst word in the English dictionary," while another says, "I despise the sick, repugnant word!" It's hard to top the aversion felt for moist, but some other Visual Thesaurus "least favorites" can provoke similar reactions: panty/panties, vomit, ointment, and slacks.

It's difficult to find any unifying thread for these words that get people's goat. But much like the enjoyable words on the "favorites" list like serendipity and mellifluous, there's a certain sound/sense combination that sparks these word aversions. Why does moist merit a Facebook group of haters, while hoist and joist go unnnoticed? It's more than just the sound of the word: the disliked words tend to have some basic level of ickiness. As I told the Albany Times Union, this ickiness can have to do with slimy stuff, bodily discharge, or other things that people would prefer not to think about. Icky words include nostril, crud, pus, and pimple. Ointment and goiter share the "oi" sound with moist: there must be something about that diphthong that gets under people's skin.

"Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?" (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Here's a delightful collection of photos melding people's faces with the art on bills. It reminds me of the "transparent screen illusion" but more fun. Having Fun with Money at Work (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Rotofugi Gallery in Chicago will be showing new works by Brian Morris & Mitch O'Connel. The show is called Secret Handshakes.

May 22 - June 7, 2009. Opening Reception Friday, May 22nd, 7-10pm.

Al writes "Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have immunized monkeys against the simian immunodeficiency virus , the animal model that is closest to HIV. They did so by shuttling a gene into the monkeys' muscles, making the muscle cells produce antibody-like molecules that work against SIV. With both SIV and HIV, the chameleon-like mutability of the virus's surface changes so quickly that most antibodies made by the immune system are soon rendered ineffective. Philip Johnson and colleagues designed DNA sequences for two antibodies known to be effective against SIV. They used antibody-like molecules, called immunoadhesins, in which the functional part of an antibody is fused with a more stable section of another antibody. The same approach could be used to deliver antibodies that are effective against HIV, but which the body doesn't normally produce."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download MP4. This episode of Boing Boing Video is brought to you by WEPC.)

Boing Boing Video guest contributor Miles O'Brien brings us this special report on the same day NASA astronauts complete their final space walk -- and zero-g repair job -- on the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission #4.

Miles says:

Astronauts spend a lot more time training for missions than flying in space. But I wouldn't feel sorry for them as the training is an amazing adventure unto itself. They practice in airplanes that fly a roller-coaster pattern to give them brief stints of weightlessness (the so called Vomit Comet); they get to zoom around in supersonic T-38 training jets; they fly approaches to shuttle runways in a Gulfstream jet rigged up to fly (or more accurately, plummet) like a real orbiter; they get time in high-fidelity full motion simulators; they use virtual reality goggles to practice tasks they will perform in space - and if they are a spacewalker, they get to spend a lot of time in a huge swimming pool in a former hangar at Ellington Field - near the Johnson Space Center in Houston - learning the nuances of working in the void.

Astronaut John Grunsfeld, who is an astronomer and a huge fan of the Hubble Space Telescope, invited me to join him during one of his 6 hour "runs" in the big pool - officially known as the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. I watched him as he practiced the most challenging spacewalk of his long career - the resuscitation of the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Worried as he was about accomplishing this intricate task - not designed to be done by the thick, gloved hand of a spacewalker - when he did the real thing the other day (Saturday) it went of without a hitch - unlike the other 4 spacewalks of the fifth and final Hubble Repair Mission.

The spacewalks are now over - and a shuttle crew has left Hubble behind for the last time. The telescope is in the best shape it has ever been in - Hubble's "Perils of Pauline" tale now mashed up with "Benjamin Button". The eye above the sky will begin a new phase of scientific discovery making astronomers pretty happy right about now. But for those of us who are passionate about sending human beings into space, and have enjoyed watching this adventure unfold over the past 19 years, it is the end of a great era - a wistful moment.

Miles is the only reporter who has ever dived in the NBL.

Hubble crewmember Mike Massimino, shown above doing Hubble telescope repairs today in the Atlantis cargo bay, is on Twitter: @Astro_Mike. You can follow Miles O'Brien on Twitter, too: @milesobrien. His features at trueslant.com are here. Catch his launch coverage at spaceflightnow.com. Official NASA STS-125 mission page is here.

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RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

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The BlimpDuino is the latest creation by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine and DIY Drones. This amazing kit will make it's debut at Maker Faire Bay Area on May 30th & 31st. Be sure to stop by the Maker Shed to see BlimpDuino flying all around.

Features

• 17 grams, with ultrasonic and IR sensors.
• Controls two motors and one vectoring servo.
• Built-in RC compatibility (can read two RC channels--throttle and steering)
• Designed for a 7.4v LiPo battery; has an automatic power cut-off at low voltage to protect the battery

The BlimpDuino kit is a very low cost, open source, autonomous blimp. It consists of an Arduino-based blimp controller board with on-board infrared and ultrasonic sensors and an interface for an optional RC mode, a simple gondola with two vectoring (tilting) differential thrusters, and ground-based infrared beacon.

We will begin shipping the week of May 25th.

In the Maker Shed: BlimpDuino kit by Chris Anderson

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On Friday, we mentioned in passing that a class action lawsuit had been filed against Google, claiming that its allowance of trademarked terms to be used in keyword advertising was an abuse of trademark law. Eric Goldman had an interesting analysis of the case, noting that it was the first such attempt to create a class action lawsuit around this issue. As we've discussed, such lawsuits don't make much sense. First, there's no violation of trademark in running an ad against a trademarked keyword (there's no confusion by the user and there's no dilution of the mark). Second, even if there is trademark infringement, the infringer would be the company taking out the ad, not Google. But why let that stop a chance to score millions from Google.

When I saw the NY Times coverage of the lawsuit, it caught my attention that the woman behind the lawsuit was named Audrey Spangenberg, because it reminded me of Erich Spangenberg, a rather notorious patent hoarder who has made millions producing nothing, but suing an awful lot. This is the same Erich Spangenberg who had to pay $4 million after he was caught shuffling patents around among his many different shell companies, so that he could sue Chrysler three times over the same patent, despite earlier settlements promising never to use the same patent against Chrysler again.

Still, I figured it must be a coincidence -- surely, there must be a fair number of Spangenbergs in the world. However, Joe Mullin, IP reporter extraordinaire, has a detailed post explaining that the two are, in fact, married, and also detailing how Erich Spangenberg has sued Google multiple times for patent infringement. Apparently, the family is branching out into questionable trademark lawsuits as well. Audrey Spangenberg claims (don't they always?) that the lawsuit is about "respect for intellectual property" rather than money. So, I'm sure that she'll gladly donate any money she and her husband make from all these lawsuits to groups that respect intellectual property, such as Creative Commons, EFF or the Free Software Foundation, right?

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Spike Priggen sells DVDs of old Scopitone videos. (Scopitones were jukeboxes that played 16mm movies that were precursors to music videos. Read about them on Wikipedia.)

Spike just sent me this bizarre Scopitone movie called "Fiesta Hippie,: which stars Les Ballets Jackson, a topless troupe of French dancers dressed in Roger Vadim fantasy outfits.

Les Ballets Jackson "Fiesta Hippie"

alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My latest Guardian column, "We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage," talks about how the policy debate over "Digital Britain" has ignored the most important aspect of a digital nation: a fair deal on open network access.

But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one - not even the most experienced internet user - can determine in advance how much bandwidth they're about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you've clicked on it, chances are that you still don't know how many bytes you've consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.

Even ISPs aren't good at figuring this stuff out. Users have no intuition about their bandwidth consumption and precious little control over it.

Metering usage discourages experimentation. If you don't know whether your next click will cost you 10p or £2, you will become very conservative about your clicks. Just look at the old AOL, which charged by the minute for access, and saw that very few punters were willing to poke around the many offerings its partners had assembled on its platform. Rather, these people logged in for as short a period as possible and logged off when they were done, always hearing the clock ticking away in the background as they worked.

We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage

Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death is the latest collection from Wondermark, the demented and delightful webtoon built around Victorian engraving clip-art and snappy dialog. As the title suggests, this volume is loosely structured around medical themes, with loads of funny little arch snippets of text and graphics on the theme of absurd, notional Victorian quack remedies (I kept being reminded of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases).

Wondermark reads like Terry Gilliam crossed with The Far Side, and I found myself laughing my ass off throughout this delightful little journey. Dark Horse did a great job on the presentation and cloth binding, too. A must-have for truss-aficionados, clip-art nuts, webcomix geeks, and happy mutants.

Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death

angry tapir writes "Toshiba has filed suit in a US court against Imation and several manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media for the alleged infringement of its patents. Imation and the other defendant companies named in the complaint do not have license agreements covering recordable DVD media with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C), and have engaged in the import and sale of recordable DVD media in the US without permission, according to Toshiba."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jill says: "In this week’s New York magazine, contributing editor Sam Anderson declares enough with the anti-multitasking alarmism (Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the 'dumbest generation' is leading us into a 'dark age') and writes about the benefits of overstimulation. The future won’t be about focusing more—it’ll be about focusing even less…"

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

In Defense of Distraction

Here's my favorite bit from the latest edition of Harper's Weekly:

Arkansas state Senator Kim Hendren [left] apologized for calling New York Senator Chuck Schumer "that Jew" at a county Republican meeting. "I was attempting to explain that, unlike Senator Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show," explained Hendron. "I made the mistake of referring to Senator Schumer as 'that Jew' and I should not have put it that way, as this took away from what I was trying to say." Venetia Phair, nee Burney, who as an 11-year-old girl in 1930 named the newly discovered planet Pluto, died at age 90. "In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside," said an amateur astronomer, "the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for."

Harper's Weekly for May 19, 2009

Wooster Collective caught up with Aaron Rose, who is co-developing an after school program for kids called "Make Something!!" with Kanye West. He says:

I was one of those kids who absolutely hated school. I always felt that I didn’t quite fit into the education system as it was and yearned to find a place to belong. I started the Make Something!! program to be a home for kids who feel as displaced in school as I did. Last summer, when we first started the Make Something!! workshops we had no idea that they would have the effect that they did. Our original concept was simply to hold ten workshops that exposed a small number of kids to DIY (do-it-yourself) ethics. Since then the program has grown exponentially, beyond my wildest dreams. Seeing the looks on kids faces when they actually accomplish something that they never thought possible has been one of the greatest rewards of my professional career.

This program, based out of an LA studio that will open later this year, bases its DIY spirit in skateboarding, hip-hop, punk, and graffiti cultures. I can't wait to see what these kids create! Kanye says:

I believe every child is born an artist. That ability to express ourselves freely is inherent in every child, whether it's through singing, dancing, drawing or playing. Somehow as we get older society and culture dampen that spirit, making us self conscious about expression. I believe Programs like Make Something!! help to keep this creative spirit alive as well as show kids that being an artist is a viable career path. As public funding for schools and arts programs continue to be cut, programs like Make Something!! are critical to breeding future generations of artists who can contribute to the greater cultural fabric that keeps America forward thinking and progressive.

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A stroll through Eric Archer's synth prototype photoset reveals some of the most awesomely intricate specimens of DIY electronics I've ever come upon. I do believe I'm experiencing solder-envy. Seen above is his modified recreation of the TR-808 Rhythm Composer's rimshot/clave circuit.

I had the chance to snap a quick macro shot of Eric's touring gear when E-Squared performed at the last Handmade Music event -

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jag7720 writes "I am part of a new project that will be filming a documentary. The project HQ will be in the US but it will take us around the world and will last approx 18 months. I am the IT guy and will be responsible for most if not all aspects of hardware and software (not to include editing). We are probably going to use Google mail/calendar/docs and unlocked BlackBerrys for communications. Computers use will mainly be for communications and writing. I am a huge advocate of Linux and Open Source and I want to use it if possible. What would you recommend for an OS platform for a project like this and why? Linux? Mac? Win?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the most annoying things about Major League Baseball's online viewing options is the ridiculous "blackout" areas. Basically, you can watch any team you want... as long as they're not our local team. Seriously. The misguided fear was that the local TV stations would lose out on revenue because people would be watching online instead of on TV. This is similar to the incredibly wrong theories when TV first became popular that local TV shouldn't be allowed to show local games if the stadiums weren't sold out. Rather than recognizing that giving fans more tools to watch games however they want, they seem to think that fans can be forced to watch in the method MLB wants. However, now MLB.com has taken it even further. It's patented its method for determining who to block out.

You can check out the full patent yourself to see if you can figure out how this was granted. If you asked any half-way competent programmer how to set up such a system, they could all come up with something identical to this. How is this possibly not obvious? Determining where an internet user is geographically has been around for ages. Limiting access by subscription levels has been around forever. Combining the two hardly seems new and innovative. This seems like it should fail based on general obviousness, as well as the new tests under the KSR ruling (on obviousness) and the Bilski ruling (on pure software patents). About the only "good" that comes of this is that perhaps it means other sports leagues won't use such an anti-fan policy.

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Recently on Offworld we played Fathom, the latest web game by Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman (who had a hand in the recently featured Paper Moon, iPhone's Wurdle, and indie favorite grappler Gravity Hook), and found a fantastic short story of a game about duty and dedication that's hiding much more depth than its cutely militant pixels/chiptunes first present. We also saw the game One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson called out as the Zelda chapter too few have played, Majora's Mask, added to the Wii's Virtual Console so everyone can have their own one more go, hoped for a new dawn of the dead with Left 4 Dead's SDK released to the PC public, and saw the latest reason the Team Fortress team need to work on a feature length film. Elsewhere, iPhone publisher ngmoco reveal a Halo connection in their latest first person shooter, a Romanian magazine offers an eBoy poster and a chiptune/indie game DVD, we hear Japanese synth-legends YMO get covered on the Nintendo DS, see the latest official Metal Gear vinyl, crochet our own Noby Noby BOYs, and see Mario jonesing for his next mushroom fix. Finally, the day's 'one shot's: Half Life in Lego, and indie game bling with a BeDazzling Darwinia jacket.

Talking with your hands as you speak helps you get your point across to the people you're talking to. But new research suggests gesturing can help you think too. For example, students who gestured while discussing math problems were better at learning how to solve the problems. (And no, they weren't counting on their fingers.) Now, researchers from the University of Chicago and University of Iowa are trying to figure out the relationship between gestures and abstract mental processes. From Scientific American:

The new study... focused on third and fourth graders solving a problem that required grouping. Students who are coached to make the "v" gesture when solving a math problem like 3+2+8 = ___+8 learn how to solve the problem better. But students also do a better job even if they were coached to make the "v" shape under the wrong pair of numbers. The very act of making the "v" shape introduces the concept of "grouping" to the student, through the body itself.

But what, exactly, was the process that made this possible? During the study, all of the students memorized the sentence "I want to make one side equal to the other side." They were then asked to say the sentence out loud when they were give a problem to solve. The authors suggest that students who also gestured attempted to make sense of both the speech and gesture in a way that brought the two meanings together. This process, they suggest, could crystallize the new concept of "grouping" in the student's mind.

The same process could occur in any situation where the person who is speaking and gesturing is also trying to understand - be it remembering details of a past event, or figuring out how to put together an Ikea shelf.

With a wave of the hand

Cousin Scuzzy writes "This morning I awoke to 26 e-mail messages from Skype and PayPal notifying me of multiple payments for my Skype account that had been charged to my credit card and subsequently refunded. At first I suspected that this was a new wave of spam that had slipped through my defenses, but it quickly became apparent that they were legitimate messages. I then began to worry that my Skype account had been compromised. The first message from Skype thanked me for setting up their "Auto-Recharge" service which automatically purchases Skype credit when the balance falls below a certain amount. This was very suspicious, as I had never requested this service. Based on posts to Skype's forum, it now appears that there have been serious billing problems at Skype relating to Auto-Recharge for over a month. Although I believe that all unauthorized charges to my credit card have been refunded, it is worrisome that Skype, or anyone, would charge my account erroneously. Skype, for their part, has not yet e-mailed me an explanation or posted one online. This problem reinforces my aversion to automatic bill payment services that give companies the authority to draw money from my bank account at their discretion." For all the Skype users out there, have you experienced this? For what it's worth, the company's own response on the linked forum thread says that the problem is now solved.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This guy modified his Slam Man Boxing Dummy, adding arcade buttons, so he can throw punches in NES Mike Tyson's Punch-Out by punching buttons of the dummy. His Instructable shows you how he did it.

The Punchout Interactive Interface Improved

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"My name is Julia Dales and I want to win the Beatbox Battle Wildcard." And guess what. She did. More on the Beatbox Battle World Championship in this NPR post. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Tom has the details on this great t-shirt design featuring Mario scoring some magic mushrooms.
"Mario Gets A Fix"

Debuting at the Volt Festival (site in Swedish) on June 6th in Uppsala, Sweden, the latest incarnation of the Bacterial Orchestra - Public Epidemic No 1 - will be unleashed on a participating public. Organizers speculate impending world-wide sound pandemic.

What do you get if you gather hundreds of iPhones and let them play with each other? A huge musical organism that is not only self-organizing, but also evolving with the sound environment.

Enter the new generation: Bacterial Orchestra - Public Epidemic No 1 (2009).

Bacterial Orchestra (2006) is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. The installation consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

Public Epidemic No 1 (2009) is a generation of the installation where each cell lives on an Apple iPhone (it can be ported to any mobile phone, but the iPhone was chosen because it's popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread...

Bacterial Orchestra [via TUAW]

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Olympus has announced firmware updates for the four of its lenses. The Zuiko Digital ED 8mm F3.5 Fisheye, ED 18-180mm F3.5-6.3, ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6 and ED 90-250mm F2.8 are all modified to improve peformance when sequential shooting on the E-3 and E-30 DSLRs in Continous AF mode.

brumgrunt writes "JJ Abram's hugely successful — on many levels — reboot of Star Trek has, for Den Of Geek, brought to the fore a lesson about special effects that many movie makers have been missing. Surely it's time now that special effects were actually used properly?" (The new film is not without some goofs, though only a few of the ones listed by Movie Mistakes' nitpickers are sciency.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC News reports on the strange low-frequency "hums" that have annoyed people and fueled conspiracy theorists around the world for years. Perhaps the best-known example in the United States is called the Taos Hum because many people in Taos, New Mexico claim to hear it. In the UK, there's also the Bristol Hum and the Largs Hum. Audiologist Dr. David Baguley and researchers from the University of Salford are studying the problem to help those who suffer distress because of the weird hums. According to Baguley, "In about a third of cases there is some environmental source that can be tracked down and dealt with... Most of the time, however, there is no external noise that can be recorded or identified." From the BBC News:

His own theory - based on years of research - is that many sufferers' hearing has become over-sensitive.

Surrounded in his office by plastic models of human ears, he explains how we each have an internal volume control that helps us amplify quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration.

"If you're sitting by a table waiting for exam results and the phone rings you jump out of your skin. Waiting for a teenager to come home from a party - the key in the door sounds really loud. Your internal gain is sensitised."

This is a mechanism we all rely on at moments of pressure or stress when we want our senses on full alert.

According to Dr Baguley, the problem comes when an individual fixes on a possibly innocuous background sound, and this act of concentration then triggers the body's "internal gain", boosting the volume.

The initial "signal" may vary from person to person, but the outcome is the same.

"It becomes a vicious cycle," he explains. "The more people focus on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get, the more the body responds by amplifying the sound, and that causes even more upset and distress."

"Have you heard 'the Hum'?"

Search Engine -- the long-suffering and absolutely brilliant tech radio show/podcast -- is alive and in its new home, hosted by TVOntario, a Canadian public broadcasting that scooped the show out from underneath the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The premiere show in the new series features a long interview with me -- I was passing through Toronto last week and he came by my parents place and recorded an interview.

Inexplicably, the CBC has not set a redirect message on the old podcast feed, so subscribers to the old show are getting dead links. This is either an oversight or pure, unforgivable nastiness. Either way, it's a good time to add the new feed to your podcatcher!

What's more, TVO has given host/creator Jesse Brown permission to Creative Commons license the podcast, making it the first-ever piece of CC licensed public broadcast material in Canadian history!

Search Engine: hackers ransom medical data, and a few words with author and activist Cory Doctorow'

Podcast feed (XML)

iTunes podcast feed (XML)

Ah yes - the long awaited solution to a sad and uniquely frustrating childhood enigma. The fine folks at StupidInventions finally teach young Slinky Jr. to walk (at least on a belt sander). I will sleep well tonight!

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The final Hugo Award ballot is finally online (and, presumably, in the post). If you're registered to attend this summer's Worldcon in Montreal, Anticipation, you're eligible to vote in one of the most prestigious science fiction awards in the world (and yes indeed, I am a double nominee, thanks for asking!).

Once again, John "Mensch" Scalzi (a triple nominee) has assembled a Hugo Voters' Packet consisting of electronic versions of practically every nominated work. If you're a registered Hugo voter, he'll supply you with a copy of the whole damned thing.

Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award

The 2009 Hugo Voters Packet: Now Live

I'm generally down on fancy USB sticks, seeing as the capacity for USB memory grows so fast that the awesome new stick is obsolete long before it's un-cool. But I'll make an exception for the (admittedly tiny) 2GB Transformer stick, which goes on sale in September. Yes, even though they have a disgustingly exploitative "collector's grade version" for $2 on top of the already inflated $43 pricetag.

Transforming USB Flash Memory (2 GB) - Ravage (via OhGizmo)

snydeq writes "A new attack that peppers Google search results with malicious links is spreading quickly, CERT has warned. The attack, which can be found on several thousand legitimate Web sites, exploits flaws in Adobe software to install malware that steals FTP login credentials and hijacks the victim's browser, replacing Google search results with links chosen by the attackers. Known as Gumblar because at one point it used the Gumblar.cn domain, the attack is spreading quickly in part because its creators have been good at obfuscating their attack code and because they are using FTP login credentials to change folder permissions, leaving multiple ways they can get back into the server."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One point that often comes up (from all sides) in discussions about draconian copyright laws is the fact that, rather than worrying about copyright, new musicians can just ignore the legalities with no one being harmed. If only that were true. Earlier this year, we wrote about how those licensing policies in the US and overly aggressive enforcement by ASCAP and BMI meant that fewer and fewer venues were willing to host open mic nights, significantly harming how many young musicians get their start. Over in the UK, where venue licensing rules have reached such ridiculous levels that a woman playing the radio for her horses has to buy a performance license from PRS, it appears that politicians are finally recognizing there's a problem. A new government report is saying that such aggressive licensing policies are holding back young musicians by making it too difficult for venues to allow live performance of music:

"The licensing requirements are still too bureaucratic and costly, particularly for non-commercial groups such as sports clubs, not-for-profit establishments and organisers of occasional events. Our report calls on the government to relax restrictions in this area, which in some cases are unnecessarily draconian, and in others simply absurd."

So, it's important to remember that while you'd like to think those who recognize such draconian laws are bad can just "opt-out," it's not always so easy. The wider impact of these laws can seriously stifle opportunities for new musicians.

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Just Posted! We've had a Canon Powershot SD970 IS (IXUS 990 IS) in the office for a few weeks and - since we had the opportunity to use it extensively over the May Bank Holiday weekend - we thought we'd produce a quick gallery to give you an idea of what the camera, one of the latest additions to Canon's Powershot SD/IXUS range, is capable of.

jfruhlinger writes "For years analysts have been insisting that Apple must introduce a cheaper iPhone, and soon. So, when Business Week heard that cheaper plans were coming, it reported the news in a positively giddy tone. But, I'm convinced that this is an under-the-radar move to shift to tiered data plans. Everyone who loves their all-you-can-eat iPhone data: enjoy it while it lasts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denkitribe posted this rather sweet demo of Tinker.it!'s Arduino based sound synthesizer project, appropriately titled "Auduino". While some delay/reverb+accompaniment have definitely been added, the sweet sounds of granular synthesis still shine through -

I built one and plugged a stylus controller which was ripped from Gakken SX-150. It works very well. Its sound is dry and crispy, but I think it is not bad for $50. Want one? Do It Yourself!

Because the project uses Arduino's built-in PWM feature, litle additional hardware is needed - definitely have to bump this one up a few notches on my to-build list. Source is available on Google Code.


In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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The folks at TheWorkshop.Ca turned an old push mower, a leaf blower, a galvanized tank, and some concrete, ceramic filler, and aluminum dross into a small, mobile forge.

Knife-Making / Blacksmithing /Alloy Melting - Forge/Furnace

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Consumerist has the story of how a guy who's account on some pay porn site got hacked, with $450 charged to his account. When he threatened to have his credit card company dispute the charge, the site warned him that doing so was a "serious violation of our terms of service." They also refused to return the money (though they said he could get credit at the site). Of course, he still had his credit card company dispute the charges and got his money back. Still, it takes quite an amazing sense of entitlement to (a) claim that you're not giving a guy whose account was hacked his money back and then (b) threaten him with a TOS violation for disputing the charge.

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wjousts writes "Several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret questions (the hijacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was one). This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, will show how woefully insecure secret questions actually are. As reported in Technology Review: 'In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.'" Schneier pointed out years ago how weird it is to have a password-recovery mechanism that is less secure than the password.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a really cool robot by Patrick Adesso. It uses a MAKE Controller to communicate with a desktop application written in Flex / ActionScript. Check out the link for more information, pictures, and the source code. [Thanks Liam!]

A personal project to create a mobile robotic platform, started more than a year ago. Desktop software (originally created in .NET C# and then ported to Flex/ActionScript) communicates with the mobile platform, can monitor its surroundings via a mounted webcam, operate it remotely and activate autonomous mode.

More about the Robot based on the MAKE Controller

In the Maker Shed:


More about the Make Controller 2.0 & Interface Board kit

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Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa have discovered a sophisticated stone-age "superglue" that was used to make and reinforce tools:

Stone Age humans... knowingly tweaked the chemical and physical properties of an iron-containing pigment known as red ochre with the gum of acacia trees to create adhesives for their shafted tools.

Archaeologists had believed the blood-red pigment--used by people in what is now South Africa about 70,000 years ago--served a decorative or symbolic purpose.

But the scientists had also suspected that the pigment may have been purposely added to improve glue that held the peoples' tools together.

Stone Age Superglue Found -- Hints at Unknown Smarts? (via Make)

Way back in 2002, we wrote that with all the efforts (mostly in the UK) to try to allow law enforcement officials to collect more and more surveillance data that more data doesn't mean better data, and in fact, all that data often makes it harder to find the right or necessary data. The trick is to be smarter about surveillance, not just focus on getting more. It appears that police in the UK are finally learning this lesson. Last month, we saw how all that data was leading to mistakes as patterns were being spotted that weren't there. And, now, UK police are discovering that they're missing important information and clues because they're just overwhelmed by garbage data. Of course, this won't stop the increasing collection of data, because no one seems to want to admit that too much data helps bury the needles deeper in the haystack.

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Aaron sez, "An engineer gutted an old Volkswagen that he bought on Craigslist and designed a custom electric motor for it. It can hit 82 MPH!"

Tischer converted a '91 VW Passat with a blown engine. He found it on Craigslist for $1,800. The Passat is a bit big for a conversion, he says, but it's aerodynamic and attractive. That counts for a lot. "It's just a professional looking car with a beautiful interior, and something I enjoy having as a daily driver," he said.

Tischer's EV project

VW Owner Shifts Gears, Goes From Gas to Electric (Thanks, Aaron)

judgecorp writes "IBM has said that water-cooled servers could become the norm in ten years. The company has lately been promoting wider user of the forty-year-old mainframe technology (e.g., here's a piece from April 2008), which allows faster clock speeds and higher processing power. But IBM now says water cooling is greener and more efficient, because it delivers waste heat in a form that's easier to re-use. They estimate that water can be up to 4,000 times more effective in cooling computer systems than air. However, most new data center designs tend to take the opposite approach, running warmer, and using free-air cooling to expend less energy in the first place. For instance, Dutch engineer Imtech sees no need for water cooling in its new multi-story approach which reduces piping and saves waste."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tracy writes in to alert us to an attempt by a Milwaukee newspaper to get people to pay, specifically for investigative reporting, by publishing it in the paper a week before it goes online for free and by offering it online only to paying subscribers:

Investigative reporting is the most expensive form of journalism produced by the Journal Sentinel newsroom. Because of the expense and resources it requires, we are giving our print and e-edition subscribers exclusive access to the Preacher's Mob series. We will be doing this on a regular basis with certain enterprise stories and investigations. Online readers will be able to see the full story later this week. For now, all readers can read this summary version below or click on several interactive and multimedia features, including a mini-documentary that contains jailhouse interviews, audio files of secret recordings of Michael Lock by a law enforcement informant, and an interactive map of key dates and places in the world of Michael Lock. With an e-edition subscription, you can read the full series as it unfolds over five days in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel starting May 17.

On the whole, I don't think this is as bad an idea as some others, but it's difficult to see how it'd be successful. If the details of a story are really that interesting, then any other news organization in the area has incentive to at least report on the high points for free online and get all the online traffic that the Journal Sentinel should have received. Also, the number of people who really think it's worth paying for a few investigative reports to get it a week before others get to see it seems like a very small audience. I'd imagine the lost online ad revenue from not drawing traffic to the website is a much bigger number than the incremental new subscribers who want to read the story at the Journal Sentinel.

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Jebediah sez, "This is a photo gallery of strange and striking freeway interchange configurations, including ones like the volleyball, the double trumpet, and the turbine. Many are as, or more, visually interesting than the cloverleaf. Learning all the different varieties makes one feel a bit like a birdwatcher when driving on the interstate. 'Oh, there's a classic diamond! And there's a clovermill!'"

What's A 'Spooey'? A Field Guide To Freeway Interchanges, Part 1 (Thanks, Jebediah!)

Hugh sez, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry has put together a great whitepaper with tips on how to avoid having your parody or gripe site shut down."

Here's a story we hear a lot at EFF: You think BadCo, Inc. is a bad actor and you've developed a really cool site to tell the world why. Maybe just by griping about them or maybe through a bit of parody. Fast forward two weeks: you're basking in the pleasure of calling BadCo out when bam! You find out your site's been shut down. You call your internet service provider to find out what's going on. After way too much time climbing phone trees and sitting on hold you get an answer--Badco has claimed that your site violates its intellectual property rights.

All too often, the targets of critics and parodists try to strike back with accusations of copyright or trademark infringement. While such accusations may be something of a badge of honor--after all, at the very least, it means you've got your target's attention--they can also be frustrating and intimidating. And, if you rely on a service provider with little interest in protecting free speech, allegations of infringement can result in your site being shut down with little or no warning.

Six Simple Steps You Can Take To Protect Your Gripe or Parody Site (Thanks, Hugh!)

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia has proposed a pretty good "Technology Bill of Rights" encompassing DRM, neutrality, anonymity, liability for malware, liability for proprietary software, and open source for government. I think it's a great starting point, though some of the Slashdotters suggest modelling it on the US Bill of Rights and/or the Makers' Bill of Rights.

Article 4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product

Related to Article 3, this is a sticky one. On the one hand, a company should be held responsible for damages caused by negligence in their product. On the other hand, attributing this to computer software could be extremely problematic to proprietary software companies. Maybe it should be met halfway -- a proprietary software company is compelled by law to immediately notify the public when vulnerabilities are discovered in their products. They are then granted two weeks to issue a patch to fix the problem. If not, they face increasing fines for every day a patch is not released. Also, there should be a mandatory update check in every product. This is far from a perfect implementation, but some form of this concept needs to be introduced.

Technology Bill of Rights (via /.)

Here's the latest from media art superstar Zach Lieberman and friends:

Lights On is an audio visual performance created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, which has a facade that contains 1085 LED controllable windows. The windows' colors are changed in realtime with music that's broadcasted on speakers surrounding the building.

Visuals coded in openFrameworks by Zachary Lieberman, Joel Gethin Lewis and Damian Stewart (yesyesno). music by Daito Manabe, with support from Taeji Sawai and Kyoko Koyama. We made this in three days :)

The performance is approximately 10 minutes long. this is an edit. also, we've recorded the output from the software (audio / OSC) and this performance can be replayed in the future for events, etc.

Here are two places to find more info on the hardware setup for the facade lighting.

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Jane Sample and her blog-readers are composing "brand-timelines" that show which brands they interact with through the day... Mine would go phone, laptop, six zillion websites, diapers, milk, coffee, porridge, fruit, Dr Bronner's, stroller, then nothing until mid-afternoon (my reading time) when there'd be a publisher logo, then nothing until evening, then diapers, baby shampoo, a million websites, and nothing.

Brand Timeline Portraits (via Kottke)

Throbbing Gristle's Chris Carter made a short video tribute to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Dig that pedal pandemonium! Ever since it was founded in 1958 to create sound effects and scores for radio programs, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been a huge influence on many electronic and experimental musicians. (via @chris_carter_)

Hugh Pickens writes "New cars and trucks will have to get 30 percent better mileage starting in 2016 under an Obama administration move to curb emissions tied to smog and global warming. While the 30 percent increase would be an average for both cars and light trucks, the percentage increase in cars would be much greater, rising from the current 27.5 mpg standard to 42 mpg. Environmentalists praised the move. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, called it 'one of the most significant efforts undertaken by any president, ever, to end our addiction to oil and seriously slash our global warming emissions.' Obama's plan also would effectively end litigation between states and automakers that had opposed state-specific rules, arguing that having to meet several state standards would be much more expensive for them than just one federal rule. The Detroit News reported that automakers were on board with the new rule and had worked with the administration on creating a timeline for the transition." There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, some folks in the UK haven't yet realized that no database is fully secure, and any large database of info will almost certainly be abused at some point. In what appears to be a stunningly bad idea, the UK has put together a giant database including info on every child in the UK. The goal is for it to be used by childcare professionals, but you can bet it will be misused quite soon. As internet law expert Michael Scott notes: "Who thought this was a good idea? And why?"

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Following Craigslist's decision to cave in to demands and start monitoring every "adult services" post on its platform, the Wall Street Journal is running a rather odd article suggesting that this somehow shows "the perils of self-policing" by a community, and suggesting that such crowdsourced reviews don't work. Except, that's a gross misreading of the actual situation. The crowdsourcing worked just fine. The issue was that members of the Craigslist community didn't have a problem with the ads in question. Those who did have problems were grandstanding politicians looking to get elected to higher office. If anything, it doesn't show the perils of self-policing, it shows the perils of getting caught in the sights of grandstanding politicians who need to whip up populist anger even if they have no legal basis to do so.

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Miracle Jones writes "In an effort to compete with Amazon and Google, the document-hosting website Scribd will now be letting writers and publishers sell documents that they upload. They will be offering an 80/20 profit-sharing deal in favor of writers. Writers will be able to charge whatever they want. In addition, Scribd will not force any content control (although they will have a piracy database and bounce copyrighted scans) and will let writers choose to encrypt their books with DRM or not. This is big news for people in publishing, who have been seeking an alternative to Amazon for fear that Amazon is amassing too much power too quickly in this brand-new marketplace, especially after Amazon's announcement last week that they will now be publishing books as well as selling them."

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.)

I saw Richard Kadrey and Heather Shaw reading at the SF in SF series this weekend.

The readings were good and somewhat cyberpunk/urban-fantasy. Heather read her story "LIttle M@tch Girl," and Richard read from his Sandman Slim novel, due out in July, 2009.

"Little M@tch Girl," by the way, exists online, but in the context of incredibly weird zine called Tumbarumba. In order to read the stories in Tumbarumba, you go to their site, download a Firefox add-on, and wait for random story scraps to show up on pages that you're browsing. If you click on one of the story scraps you get more of the story in question. Not exactly the kind of presentation that most writers would pick! I'm kind of hoping to see "Little M@tch Girl" in an easier-to-access format one of these days...

Before the reading we had dinner at a place near this great collaborative graffiti mural at 2nd St. and Minna St. in San Francisco.

I dig that savage alien fire hydrant. "Bad dog!"

From National Geographic:

Ancient people in what is now South Africa whipped up a glue of powdered red ochre and acacia-tree gum to keep their tools (above, a replicated tool with adhesive made by scientists) intact, a May 2009 study says.

Stone Age Superglue Found -- Hints at Unknown Smarts?

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We've discussed in the past how Google has become a version of the mythical permanent record that our teachers warned us about in school, but for some it's becoming embarrassing. We've all heard the stories of folks who lost jobs or dates due to their social networking profiles, but what about what they wrote in their college newspaper? Apparently, professional journalists are so upset about the quality of their work from when they were in college, that they're asking universities to take down their old writings, especially since it sometimes ranks better in Google than their modern work. Thankfully, most college papers are refusing to take down the content, but it is a reminder (once again) that everything you write can, and will, be used against you sooner or later.

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