Mountain Bike Rescue

This Friday, May 22nd, is the deadline for the MakeShift challenge that appeared in MAKE, Volume 17. To enter, send a detailed description of your MakeShift solution with sketches and/or photos to makeshift@makezine.com.
Here's the challenge:

The Scenario: You and your best friend, both experienced mountain bikers, take off on a daylong jaunt to explore a little-known and rocky canyon trail. The ride is challenging but spectacular until, as you finally decide to turn around and head back, your friend's bike hits a loose rock, skids out from under him, and they both topple off the edge of the trail down into the canyon. Smashing his knee in the fall, your friend manages to land on a thin, unstable ledge about 15 feet straight down from the trail, only able to keep himself from falling farther by grabbing onto a small but secure tree branch jutting out from the rock, while his bike cartwheels out of sight to the bottom of the canyon.

The Challenge: Your friend is clearly in a lot of pain and there's no telling how long the ledge he's on will hold, so riding the many miles out to the trailhead to call for outside help is not an option. And, as is always the case in these situations, your cellphone gets no signal out here. Bottom line, you need to figure out a way to get your friend, who weighs a good 30 pounds more than you, up off that ledge and back down the trail to your car before nightfall -- which is maybe four or so hours off.

What You Have: In addition to your bike, you've got your daypack, which contains a canteen of water, some protein bars, a basic bicycle repair tool kit, an extra inner tube, your Swiss Army knife or Leatherman tool, a strong, flexible, 3-foot wire saw with split-ring finger-handles on both ends, some waterproof matches, and roughly 30 feet of strong nylon cord you use to tie your bikes onto the car. Since you know from experience that you can't predict the weather, you also have some waterproof nylon rain gear and a warm jacket.

There are some small trees on the upper side of the trail but none immediately adjacent to the ledge where your friend fell. Though he's conscious, it's best to assume he can do very little to assist you in getting him off the ledge below, and he certainly won't be able to walk if and when you do. However, he does have enough strength in his arms to hang onto the tree branch, at least for now. So what are you going to do?

If duplicate solutions are submitted, the winner will be determined by the quality of the explanation and presentation. The most plausible and most creative solutions will each win a MAKE T-shirt and a MAKE Pocket Ref. Think positive and include your shirt size and contact information with your solution. Good luck!

For readers' solutions to previous MakeShift challenges, visit makezine.com/makeshift.

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eldavojohn writes "Ralph Nader's back to hounding the automotive industry ... but it's not about safety this time, it's about the pesky DRM in your car. Most cars have a UART in them that allows you to read off diagnostic codes and information about what may be wrong with the vehicle so you can repair it. Late model cars have been getting increasingly complex and dependent on computers which has caused them, as with most things digital, to move towards a proprietary DRM for these tools, diagnostic codes and updated repair information. This has kept independent auto-shops out of the market for fixing your car and relegating you to depend on pricier dealers to get your automotive ailments cured. The bill still has a provision to protect trade secrets but is a step forward to open up the codes and tools necessary to keep your car running."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laws that ban individual activities -- like cell phone use -- while driving are often little more than political hype. Singling out specific activities for bans doesn't do much to address the root problem of unsafe driving, which remains the issue regardless of its cause, while also generating the implication that if a specific action while driving hasn't been banned, it's okay and safe. Nevertheless, plenty of states have moved forward with laws banning talking on cell phones while driving, and more recently, texting. Next, they'll have to ban using the mobile web, or IM, or playing Tetris on your phone while driving, since they've left these (and plenty of other activities) out, but we digress... In any case, Missouri's legislature has taken the silliness one step further by banning texting while driving, but only for drivers under the age of 21. If you accept the supposed need for these sorts of laws, how could you argue they should only apply to those under 21? What happens on a person's 21st birthday that suddenly makes texting while driving acceptable and safe? Answers in the comments, please...

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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CWmike writes "An external hard drive that's believed to contain nearly 1TB of data from the Clinton Administration is missing from the U.S. National Archives and Recording Administration (NARA). The drive includes more than 100,000 Social Security numbers and home addresses of people who visited or worked at the White House. Among those whose information is on the list is one of then-Vice President Al Gore's three daughters. The drive also contained details on the security procedures used by the Secret Service at the White House, as well as event logs, social gathering logs, political records and other information from the Clinton administration. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) said the Archives was in the process of converting information from the drive to a digital records system when it apparently disappeared. The hard drive was apparently removed from a secure storage area to a workplace where at least 100 'badge-holders' had access to it, Issa noted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After writing about how NebuAd had shut down, a commenter pointed out this wasn't quite true. Instead, it appears the company has just re-appeared under a different name in the UK... where officials have ruled that clickstream tracking behavioral advertising can be legal (though that's gotten the UK into trouble with the EU). Apparently, NebuAd had opened a UK office, and with the shutdown of US operations, the UK office re-branded as Insight Ready Ltd., but it appears to be the same basic company, including same employees. And the Insight Ready domain name was registered by NebuAd....

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Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel put together a magnificent gallery of the "Gear of War." Above:

While being dragged, 225th Engineer Brigade Soldier Sgt. Kasandra Deutsch of Pineville, La., demonstrates the power of the Talon robot, April 15, during a training exercise with the 9th Iraqi Army Engineer Regiment. The Talon robot system is used to help clear improvised explosive devices."

Gallery: The Gear of War

wjousts writes "As I'm sure many Slashdot readers live almost exclusively on cola drinks, a new warning from doctors: 'Doctors have issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems, according to the June issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice. ... 'Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions.' And sorry, diet colas aren't any better."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "You know the drill, violent video game bill struck down because: "We hold that the Act, as presumptively invalid content-based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the 'variable obscenity' standard from Ginsberg v. New York. Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment." Well, that didn't satisfy a PhD child psychologist turned Democratic California State Senator named Leland Yee who states in his press release that "California's violent video game law properly seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of excessively violent, interactive video games. I am hopeful that the Supreme Court — which has never heard a case dealing with violent video games — will accept our appeal and assist parents in keeping these harmful video games out of the hands of children. I believe the high court will uphold this law as Constitutional. In fact in Roper v. Simmons, the court agreed we need to treat children differently in the eyes of the law due to brain development." His appeal (in PDF) is here and you can find some industry reactions to the Supreme Court hearing at GamePolitics. Unfortunately Yee seems to be a bit more competent than old Jack Thompson, who is pushing a bill in Louisiana today."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laughing Squid, in talking about how Eminem is the latest artist to embrace the tiered selling structure (though, I think he got the model wrong -- the music is priced way too high), calls our attention to a short article by famed musician Brian Eno that highlights the point we've been suggesting for years. The music industry is doing great, and it's doing it by selling scarcities:

Digital technology has made music easier to make and copy, with the result that recorded music is about as readily available as water, and not a whole lot more exciting.

This seems like bad news, until you pick up a copy of Time Out. Then you realise that the live music scene is exploding, for, unable to make a living from records sales, more and more bands are playing live. That experience can't be put onto a memory card--and people are willing to pay for it, and to pay quite a lot. Concert attendances are at an all-time high: recordings are increasingly ads for live shows, and live shows have become once again the real thing, the unduplicable.....

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn't easily copyable--so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they'll still want to sell their music, but now they'll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork. People who won't pay £15 for a CD will pay £150 for the limited edition version with additional artwork, photos, booklet and DVDs. They often already own the music, downloaded--but now they want the art. They're buying art, and they're buying it in a new way. That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up.

It's so great to see more and more content creators realizing this.

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Adafruit has posted another one of their awesome electronics tutorials, this one on Force Sensitive Resistors.

Force Sensitive Resistors are for squeezing!

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Al writes "Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia, have developed an optical material capable of storing information in five dimensions. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers were able to write six different patterns within the same area. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interference. The team achieved a storage density of 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of 10 nanorod layers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's Space Invaders, re-imagined as a carnival game where you throw real stuffed "missiles" at invaders on the screen. Brandon has video over at Boing Boing Offworld. "Space Invaders, the carnival game"

(Above: some ants I videotaped last year. They aren't really Crazy Rasberry Ants.)

Nothing's quite as fun as a Hellstrom Chronicle-style news story about marauding insects. This time, it's the delightfully-named Crazy Rasberry Ant, and it has its quivering antennae trained in the direction of San Antonio, Texas.

"Where you'll have 200,000 ants in a big fire ant mound, you'll have billions of crazy ants in one area, in that one group. They form a carpet of ants over acres that is several inches thick."

...

The crazy ants even kill fire ants, which many may think is good news, but they are more destructive to homes and businesses than fire ants. They pack into electrical equipment in such dense numbers that they short out computers, air conditioning units and car computers.

Destructive ants marching on San Antonio

Saint Aardvark writes "The Free Software Foundation has announced that they've settled their lawsuit with Cisco (reported earlier here). In the announcement, they say that Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, who will report periodically to the FSF; to notify Linksys customers of their rights; and to make a monetary donation to the FSF. An accompanying blog entry explains further: 'Whenever we talk about the work we do to handle violations, we say over and over again that getting compliance with the licenses is always our top priority. The reason this is so important is not only because it provides a goal for us to reach, but also because it gives us a clear guide to choosing our tactics. This is the first time we've had to go to court over a license violation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bradley writes in to alert us to the news that, in the last month or so, the lawyers over at Blizzard have been quite busy sending out an awful lot of cease-and-desist letters for pretty much anyone having anything to do with the game World of Warcraft. Among those hit with C&Ds are iPhone apps, web comics and others. The latest involves a popular fan site, called WarcraftPets.com that was apparently selling some things to support the site -- which is apparently a huge no-no to the lawyers at Blizzard (though, it's not clear why they went after some free iPhone apps as well). The whole thing doesn't make much sense. Why is it so problematic that a fan site that's helping to promote the game can't make a little profit for helping promote the game? And, yes, when it comes to trademark law, there is a duty to protect, but that's only in the cases of clear confusion. If there isn't likely to be any confusion, there shouldn't be an issue.

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Rejuvenation sells this handsome old timey cast iron bottle opener that mounts on a wall. It's $12.95.
. Cast Iron Bulldog Bottle Opener

Craig Yoe is reading from his new book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster. Here are the details:

Tomorrow night, Thursday May 21st at 8:00 pm, I'll be at an erotic reading, "In The Flesh," talking about Secret I.D. (6 other "erotic authors" will be reading from their books, too.) Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome Street, NYC.

omz writes "The ODF Alliance has prepared a Fact Sheet for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF. The report revealed 'serious shortcomings that, left unaddressed, would break the open standards based interoperability that the marketplace, especially governments, is demanding.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out WooWork's crocheted grenades: "I made these grenades from rows of popcorn stitches and double crochet stitches, with increasing single crochet stitches between each row." Make textiles not war.

Green 'round Grenades (Thanks, Shellie!)

destinyland writes "As a Rutgers philosopher discusses robot war scenarios, one science magazine counts the ways robots are already being used in warfare, including YouTube videos of six military robots in action. There are up to 12,000 'robotic units' on the ground in Iraq, some dismantling landmines and roadside bombs, but 'a new generation of bots are designed to be fighting machines.' One bot can operate an M-16 rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher — and 250 people have already been killed by unmanned drones in Pakistan. He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Raw Story reports that a military attorney who represented a suspected member of Al Qaeda (who was later freed) says her client received genital torture in a Moroccan CIA prison.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley, the lawyer for Binyam Mohamed, said "They started this monthly treatment where they would come in with a scalpel or a razor type of instrument and they would slash his genitals, just with small cuts."

Bradley told CNN that when she was first assigned to represent Mohamed, she did not question he was a hardened terrorist, because "my government was saying these were the worst of the worst." However, she now says, "There’s no reliable evidence that Mr. Mohamed was going to do anything to the United States."

Military attorney: Waterboarding is "tip of the iceberg"

On the HacDC mailing list, we've been having a discussion about Wolfram|Alpha and some of the amazing things it can do (and some of the controversy already surrounding it). Here 's the return on a query for resistor values.

Wolfram|Alpha

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It appears that Craigslist has realized, in responding to all those grandstanding Attorneys General, that it's better to take an offensive position than to continue with its defensive strategy. First, it pointed out how misguided South Carolina's Henry McMaster was in threatening to charge Craigslist's management with criminal prosecution, and then it demanded an apology. With no apology forthcoming, Craigslist has sued Henry McMaster seeking declaratory relief that its actions do not violate the law. McMaster has continued to push forward with his plans to file a lawsuit, claiming that Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is "the #1 defendant." Craigslist, in response, points out that Craigslist:

• is operating in full compliance with all applicable laws
• has earned a reputation for being unusually responsive to requests from law enforcement
• has eliminated its "erotic services" category for all US cities
• has adopted screening measures far stricter than those Mr McMaster himself personally endorsed with his signature just 6 months ago
• has far fewer and far tamer adult service ads than many mainstream print and online venues operating in South Carolina
• has made its representatives available to hear Mr McMaster's concerns in person
• has politely asked Mr McMaster to retract and apologize for his unreasonable threats

So, in response, Craigslist has filed its lawsuit to have a court declare that the company is not violating any laws, and that McMaster has no case. This is a good move, and you would have hoped it would quiet down McMaster, but he's actually (no, seriously) using this to claim victory. In a statement on his website McMaster claims:

The defensive legal action craigslist has taken against the solicitors and my office is good news. It shows that craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time.... Unfortunately, we had to inform them of possible state criminal violations concerning their past practices to produce a serious response. We trust they will now adhere to the higher standards they have promised. This office and the law enforcement agencies of South Carolina will continue to monitor the site to make certain that our laws are respected.

That's just blatant outright lying now. Craigslist made those changes last week, and at the time McMaster's response was: "That response doesn't work" and claimed it was proceeding with plans to punish Craigslist management with jail time. Since then, Craigslist has made no other change, other than to sue McMaster. To suddenly claim that it's made a new change and is taking the matter seriously, when the only change is suing McMaster, is quite the delusional response. I have no idea how likely it is that McMaster will win his current race for the Governor's spot in South Carolina -- but so far the man has been an embarrassment to the state.

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stoolpigeon writes "In 1953 John Myers brought his friend Gary Wolf a book he had just read, Space Hawk by Anthony Gilmore. The two were already avid readers but this would be their introduction to an entire genre, Science Fiction. They both say that it was Space Hawk that sparked a life long love of all things Sci-Fi. According to both of them, they had an opportunity to re-read it as adults and found that it had not weathered the years well. They decided they would write their own science fiction adventure in the same style, but do a better job. The result is their book Space Vulture." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Medgadget unboxed a beautiful and horrifying 1800s surgical kit, owned by "Dr. Geo L. Shearer (an ancient relative of one of your editors), who practiced medicine in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania from 1825 to 1878."

The set contains the basic surgical tools which would have been needed to perform emergency surgery by way of amputation and this is not an uncommon configuration. The essential tools for this would usually comprise of a Liston knife or knives which had long straight razor sharp blades polished steel blades for cutting through the muscle. A capital saw (the large one) was for sawing through weight bearing bones. The forceps and smaller knives would have been used for trimming the muscle and skin in such a way as to produce flap. The needles were used to sew the flap of skin and muscle in place over the bone stump. There would also have been a tourniquet for applying pressure around the limb to temporarily cutting off the blood supply.

In addition to these surgical tools the set also contains two hand trephines and other instruments used for trepanation. These would often come separately in their own case and so this set represents a "compendium" if you like. Other examples of sets which combined instruments for different purposes were carried on board ships. These were grand compendia with comprehensive collections of tools to manage all eventualities, including general surgical, orthopaedic, urological, ophthalmological and dental instruments.

1800s Surgical Kit - Unboxing

It came to me while washing the dishes the other day, I figured out what the NYT should do with their Twitter feed, the one with almost a million followers.

I swear to god I didn't clue Jay in on this, but he asked me the question in yesterday's mini-podcast. I think he knew that I must be working on this puzzle and maybe he sensed I'd have something to say. Jay a really smart mofo, and he and I are developing a kind of mutual ESP. It's funny how often he asks the right question, and it's also funny how often there's a flipside story to tell about evolving media to my story about the evolution of technology. I think basically he and I have been following the same thread through our society but from opposite ends of a tunnel. We see the same thing, but come at it from different points of view.

It's really cool because he gets a chance to talk to tech people, and I get a chance to talk to journalism people. I don't think many people in the tech world knew Jay, and to the extent people in the journalism world knew me, I don't think they considered the possibility that there's much thought behind my conclusions.

Anyway, listen to the podcast if you have 15 minutes. And if you don't want to read the spoiler, stop reading right now, cause I'm going to spoil it. :-)

Here's what the Times should do. They should do what they always do when people are listening to them. Cover whatever it is that those people are saying and doing. News people are mirrors, they show you what you're doing. So if they've got the attention of people on Twitter, they should cover Twitter. Whatever that means. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe as large as the population of Staten Island, certainly as big as an upstate NY county. And they have a surplus of reporters there, and thousands of stringers.

Which leads me to the second part of the recommendation. Let this be the first environment when the Times deliberately includes content from respected amateurs. This is an idea I've been pushing on the Times since 2002. Now it's time finally to do it. Let this be a lab. What you'll see is that, as a result of opening the channel, a lot of new content will spring up. People will be motivated to learn how to write the kind of stuff the Times will carry. And I think everyone will be surprised at how good it is. Don't decide in advance where it goes, let it go where it's supposed to go. News people are just mirrors, not strategists, not economists or entrepreneurs. Just mirrors.

I would add a third part. Try to develop a sense of what people on Twitter are interested in, the way you know that your New York readers are interested in: 1. NY weather. 2. What did the Mets do. 3. Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug, Jackie O, Elton John, Andy Warhol, John Lennon. 4. Etc. You get the idea. Twitter is a community with some cohesion. But it's going to change a lot in the coming months, and maybe years. Get confused along with everyone else, and write about it.

In other words, follow your nose and everything will work out. Too many reporters showing up at Jeff Jarvis confabs pretend they're Larry or Sergey or Steve or Bill. It doesn't matter what Google would do, you're not any of those people, thank god. You're reporters, and what you do is report. So that's what you should do.

If you were meant to make money doing this, as in meant by the Invisible Hand, you will. If not, something else will happen. Even the smartest financial type has no clue how the news will work economically in the future. And reporters are not smart about finance. So just do it and pray it all works out. That's basically all any of us have. So you're just like everyone else. Go figure! :-)

Earlier this month, we noted that the record labels were already stretching The Pirate Bay ruling to use it to go after web hosting firms who clearly were far separated from the actions of their clients. And, of course, the ruling itself is both being disputed, due to conflicts of interest, and also being appealed. But, it appears that the record labels are so freaked out by how badly the ruling has backfired on the industry that they're trying to do anything to regain what they think (incorrectly) is the moral victory. Among the web hosting firms they're approaching is the one that provides bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, and the music labels are demanding it to stop. Also, the labels are demanding more money. This is notable because for all the problems with the original ruling, it didn't do two things: order the site shut down or provide any guidelines regarding future infringement. So, now it appears that the labels are simply taking that matter into their own hands and interpreting the ruling beyond what it actually said. At some point, will they actually realize that everything they do here is just making things worse for themselves?

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FredMastro writes "Craigslist has now stepped past just asking for an apology. The Wall Street Journal and CNet report that Craigslist is fighting back. 'Craigslist said it has sued South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, in the latest escalation of a battle over adult-oriented ads on the company's site. Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's chief executive, said in a blog post that the company filed its suit in federal court in South Carolina. ...'" Unfortunately, the WSJ's piece requires a subscription, but reader Locke2005 adds a link to coverage in the San Jose Business Journal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another great Boing Boing Gadgets find from Joel: Frank Lloyd Wright Lego!

Brickstructures has added two more models to their series of architectural LEGO microscale models, both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Museum and Falling Water. The Gugg is $55, shipped, within the U.S.; it doesn't actually appear that Falling Water is on sale yet. [via Prairie Mod]

Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO: The Guggenheim and Falling Water

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's got the Jonathan Coulton video for The Future Soon, my fave JoCo song (I like it so much I used a line from it as a story title):

From that hairy cyborg bastard Jonathan Coulton's spanking new concert DVD, "Best. Concert. Ever." Just $20, every dollar of which goes towards bionic laser eye research.

Music Video: Jonathan Coulton "The Future Soon"

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Larry Lars is well-known in Lego builders' circles for his nifty creations as well as his nice photos of his creations. Here, he shows his photography set-up, which he re-created as a Lego diorama.

Lego photo room (Via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

I've been having a blast blogging for credit.com. Here are a few recent posts:

Spend Less by Keeping Large Bills in Your Wallet: You're less likely to spend your cash if it's in large denominations, reports the authors of a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page: Included in this ebook are a number of great tricks and tips for both spending less and earning more.

Make a list of the 10 most expensive things you own vs. the 10 things that make you the most happy: "Consumerist capitalism is the least oppressive system of mass trait display ever developed."

My Personal Credit Crisis - a New York Times' economics reporter's tale of financial disaster: Edmund L. Andrews says he willingly "joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages."

Joey Anuff is selling a bunch of beautiful original art from Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug humor magazine. (Kurtzman was the creator of Mad and he launched Humbug after leaving Mad. The high bid on this Jack Davis splash page is just $600. The auction ends Friday.

Jack Davis Humbug #7 Sputniks Splash Page 18 Original Art (Humbug, 1957). When Humbug hit the reader racks in August 1957, Harvey Kurtzman delivered his declaration of editorial principles in the first issue, "We won't write for morons. We won't do anything just to get laughs. We won't be dirty. We won't be grotesque. We won't be in bad taste. We won't sell magazines."

Jack Davis has violated nearly all of these principles with his stunning splash page for "Sputniks." For you "fact-niks," in his book The American Language, H. L. Mencken credits the postwar mania for adding "-nik" to the ends of adjectives to create nouns as beginning, not with beatnik or Sputnik, but earlier in the strips of Al Capp's Li'l Abner. Humbug!

This laugh riot has an image area of 10" x 15". There are pasted-on type and art elements, and a few small glue stains; otherwise, the art is in Excellent condition.

Fantagraphics recently published a superb 2-volume Humbug anthology.

Humbug original art on auction block

Jon Jordan writes "Pocket Gamer has been getting its fingers inside the unique new Zeebo console — a sub $200 system designed for emerging markets — to discover it's based on a hacked version of the T-Mobile G1 Google phone. It effectively consists of the chipset from the HTC Dream/G1 Android phone, plus some extra I/O to deal with TV screens, controllers and the like. If this gaming, entertainment and educational console for the billion-strong middle classes in emerging economies such as Brazil and India catches on, HTC could become a serious global gaming force. Qualcomm's Mike Yuen said in an interview, 'We have this mass market chipset, and our next-generation chipset is getting faster. What we announced, [Qualcomm's] Snapdragon [chipset], is going to netbooks; it bumps it a few notches above that. The cell phone business, including us, is never going to build a processor that's going to match or surpass what the video game guys do. So, why chase that?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: Just got word that Gama-Go is holding a 24-hour sale today starting at noon PST. Everything will be 15 percent off, making our shirts just $20.40 each!

Thank you to all who have ordered the new Boing Boing t-shirts designed by us and made by Gama-Go! So far, the Jackhammer Jitters design (above left) is the top seller. The shirt are available in men's (S-XXL) and women's sizes (S-XL). The shirts are 100% cotton and manufactured and printed in the USA. They're $24/each and if you spend $25 or more on the site, shipping is free. Thanks for your support! Boing Boing t-shirts

Another round of good stuff fills out the lineup for this month's Handmade Music @ 3rd Ward, Brooklyn. Peter of CDM provides details -

• Robotic gamelan instruments with the Gamelatron, created by Zemi17 and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) – check the video above!
  
• Rescued PDAs and iPods making music, with the Linux-powered ReWare project (which even allows you to run Pd on an old iPod), by Hans-Christoph Steiner – expect a box full of handhelds making noise
  
• Gestural Android handheld music, as I demonstrate the possibilities of the Google Android platform and G1 phone for OSC
  
• The Arduino-based Hard/Soft synth, designed by Gijs Gieskes and built by MAKE’s Collin Cunningham

Yups, I'll be on hand with my take on the excellent Arduino Hard/Soft Synth project (video build notes to come!). If you're not in the NYC area, you can still get in on the action via live video stream of the event - more info over at Create Digital Music

Handmade Music
@ 3rd Ward
195 Morgan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11237
5-21-09 7:30pm

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BB pal Marina Gorbis, executive director of Institute for the Future, wrote a provocative essay for the Capitol Hill magazine Roll Call suggesting how much of today's corporate organizational theory has no future. We've spent a century developing organizational processes that maximize shareholder profits, she writes, but a big change is gonna come. On the horizon are: the emergence of an ecological/epidemiological view of markets and behaviors, a workforce of amplified individuals, and the engagement economy. From Roll Call:

The corporate culture we created spread well beyond the business realm. In his forthcoming book “Life Inc.,” media expert Douglas Rushkoff points out that corporatism has permeated our culture, language, philanthropic organizations, schools and media. It is how we’ve come to think about getting things done. We almost cannot conceive of a world without hierarchical organizational charts, mission statements, bounded departments, and clear sets of corporate rules and incentives.

All of this is about to change. You can think of the next decade as a decade of experimentation with new ways of organizing our society, including our economic and business activities. Beginnings of new organizational shapes already abound — from Wikipedia to volunteers taking over customer-support services for organizations. Turns out that being helpful to others can be its own reward.

"Organizational Change Is Coming Soon"

Apple triumphantly announced a little while back that iPhone and iPod Touch users had downloaded more than a billion applications from its App Store in under nine months. But a research firm said last week that it estimated Apple had only earned a maximum of $45 million for itself from all those downloads. The figure was extrapolated from research into the pricing of apps, and isn't based on anything Apple has disclosed about App Store revenues, but it does illustrate how Apple's using the App Store: just like the iTunes Music Store, as a means to drive hardware sales rather than generate significant direct revenues. The App Store adds value to iPhones and iPod Touch devices, making the hardware more desirable, just like iTunes does for other iPod devices. That's the real value for Apple, and is measured in strong device sales, rather than direct revenues.

Will these figures and their implication put the brakes on the app store craze that's tearing through the mobile industry? If Apple's already garnered more than a billion applications, and only has a max of $45 million to show for it, it would seem to call into question the widely held belief among mobile operators and other device vendors that app stores offer a valuable new direct revenue stream. Perhaps Apple's experience demonstrates that the real value of app stores is in extending the capabilities of hardware with new software and services, and using this to make the hardware more attractive, and in turn driving sales. But will the other players see app stores in the same way, or try to exploit them as revenue streams? Apple's shown with the iTunes Music Store that it is willing to use loss leaders as a tool to sell hardware. Will operators and other vendors be prepared to do the same?

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

Mark Frauenfelder mentioned that the first time he saw me I was carrying a cardboard model of an "unfolded hypercube"---so I rooted around the house and, with my wife's help, found such a model, this one dates back to 1983.

I think it was the hyperdimensional mathematician Tom Banchoff who told me how to make this model. You cut out 28 cardboard squares and tape them, four at a time, to make seven partial cubes. These partial cubes have no tops or bottoms, they're like square tubes. And then you tape the seven partial cubes together as shown in the photos, making a very cool shape.

[You may notice that the shape is a bit like a hyperdimensional crucifix. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken, the artist Salvador Dali actually consulted with Banchoff when Dali did his well-known painting, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus).]

It's a universal joint, in that you can swivel the top part freely---which is a little surprising as its all made of straight hinges. To make this into a real hypercube, you'd fold the band of projecting cubes to match the top cube and then---this is the hard part---you "fold" the bottom cube so its faces stretch around the outsides of the other cubes. The Wikipedia Tesseract page has a little animation that helps you visualize how this might work.

The idea behind the coloring on my model is that you start with one corner of the hypercube gray, and you think of the four dimensions as adding the colors red, blue, yellow, and white, coloring the successive 15 corners accordingly. I got the coloring pattern on this model from the early mathematician and science-fictioneer Charles Howard Hinton. In 1980 I edited a book of Hinton's amazing writings, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension. You can find a lot of this book (minus my introduction) online for free.

The letters on my model have to do with the fact that this particular unfolded hypercube was a gift to my wife on our sixteenth wedding anniversery. Our family members are S, R, G, R', and I---so you can start with S and think of each of the four dimensions as adding an R, G, R', and/or I.

One way to study a cube is to slice it into 2D cross-sections, taking the slices at various angles. By the same token, you can study hypershapes by slicing them into 3D cross-sections. Mark Newbold has written a nice Java applet called "HyperSpace Polytope Slicer" that lets you look at 3D cross-sections of four-dimensional shapes (or polytopes) like the hypercube. To use this applet, go to the link and click on the Controls button to get some interactive controls you can play with. Click on View to switch from a double view to a single view. (And better not click on Detach---at least on my machine, that often freezes up the applet.)

If you crave still more hypercube fun, I have two Windows progams written by my Master's Degree students, available for free download...including a 4D "Hyperspace Invaders" game.

With the release of its Neutraface Slab family of fonts, House Industries is selling a number of products, including a set of alphabet blocks, totes, T-shirts, mousepads, posters, and this handsome boomerang chair.

Over at BB Gadgets, Rob posts the heartwarming tale of Rob Carlson, a country doctor in Maryborough, Australia, who saved a 12-year-old boy's life by drilling a hole in his skull using a Black And Decker drill. The young fellow, Nicholas Rossi, had fallen off his bike and had a brain hemorrhage. Needing to relieve the pressure on the boy's brain, Carlson grabbed a drill from the small hospital's maintenance closet and performed the trepanation. From The Age (fantastic photo from fox.out22's Flickr stream):

Over the telephone, Melbourne neurosurgeon David Wallace walked (Carlson) through the procedure...

''They stabilised Nicholas to start off with (and) they put him under anaesthetic and then Dr Carson came out and he said that he had 'one shot at this' and said what he wants to do is to drill into Nicholas' head to relieve pressure on the brain,'' (Nicholas Rossi's father) said.

Dr Carson drilled a hole just below the bruise mark, above Nicholas' ear, until a blood clot came out. He used forceps to increase the hole to about a centimetre in diameter, then inserted a drainage tube to keep the blood flowing out of the boy's skull...

Nicholas was airlifted to Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital an hour later and was released on Tuesday - his 13th birthday.

"Doctor Driller Saves Boy's Life"

eldavojohn writes "Yesterday, Moblin, the joint OS project between Novell and Intel, was released as V2.0 Beta for netbooks with the image available for download. We've talked about Moblin before, but Computer World has an article speculating this is Intel's direct affront to Microsoft's Windows 7 by pointing out that Moblin is designed to optimally use Intel's Atom Processor and smaller screens so popular with netbooks. Windows 7's netbook competition doesn't stop there, as GoodOS's gOS3 Gadgets and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix are being designed to also take advantage of Intel's Atom, especially from a UI perspective. Ars has a look at Moblin's rich new UI as well. Back in April, Intel said it would support Windows 7 on the Atom later this year, and Intel also says Windows 7 is a good choice for Intel's netbooks, so it doesn't look like they're intentionally burning any bridges between them and Redmond."

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.)

How do you market a toy that does almost nothing? Build a gnarly web ad!

We're talking about the Yo Baby, which is a skateboard with no wheels!

The presence of the turtle in the Yo Baby ad reminds me of Douglas Coupland's novel, JPod, which is about, among other things, the use of turtles in marketing, and which also has an intricate web page.

Jesse Ventura debates Elizabeth Hasselbeck about waterboarding. Who do you think won the debate?

You know, people always talk about how wild comics seem to have been created by someone "on acid." In my experience, people on acid aren't that funny -- it's being on acid that's funny.

Jonathan Rosenberg's webcomic Goats (recently collected into a handsome volume called Goats: Infinite Typewriters) makes me feel like I'm on acid.

That's because every goddamned thing that happens it is incredibly weird -- two wise-asses meet God, trick him into turning into a porkchop, eat him, then their various pets get in the act, cybernetically enhancing themselves, communing with pansexual alien Greys with 13 bladders, animating decapitated bikers by riding their neck-stumps and tugging on their spinal cords, defeating the demons of the Mayan underworld, seeing action movies about Good Space Hitler versus Evil Earth Hitler and so on -- it is never just silly. It's always infrasilly, plumbing depths of silliness that skate on the edge of incomprehensible obscenity and weird-for-the-sake-over without ever slipping over.

That's a good trick. Author Jonathan Rosenberg never seems to be trying to hard to be the class clown. This all has the refreshing spontaneous unforced high weirdness of the weirder Monty Python sketches, and it will reset your freakiness thermometer to a higher threshold than you thought possible.

Goats: Infinite Typewriters

Buy direct from the author

Goats, the webcomic

Billed as a "revenge product," the Super Sonic Nausea device is the "government model" of the regular Sonic Nausea device that "generates a unique combination of ultra-high frequency soundwaves which soon leads most in its vicinity to queasiness." I think it basically makes a high-pitched, loud, and annoying squeal. It's $99 from law enforcement and military gear supplier Shomer-Tec. From the product page:

Speeches, demonstrations, crowd dynamics, etc. - this device has been used to "influence" more of these than you might expect. Deployed near the podium, you might just have a case of an increasingly un-impressive speaker with diminished sharpness and lacking concentration, or perhaps is even unable to complete his presentation. Or, loitering youths on your property might be enticed to move along with no confrontations necessary.

Super Sonic Nausea (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

An anonymous reader writes "Not content to simply follow the 'anything to protect American lives' mantra, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to prohibit mandatory full body scans at airports. Chaffetz states, 'The images offer a disturbingly accurate view of a person's body underneath clothing ... Americans should not be required to expose their bodies in this manner in order to fly.' He goes on to note that the ACLU has expressed support for the bill. Maybe we don't need tin-foil sports coats to go with our tin-foil hats. For reference, the Daily Herald has a story featuring images from the millimeter wavelength imager, and we've talked about the scanners before."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Not content to simply follow the 'anything to protect American lives' mantra, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to prohibit mandatory full body scans at airports. Chaffetz states, 'The images offer a disturbingly accurate view of a person's body underneath clothing ... Americans should not be required to expose their bodies in this manner in order to fly." He goes on to note that the ACLU has expressed support for the bill. Maybe we don't need tin-foil sports coats to go with our tin-foil hats. For reference, the Daily Herald has a story featuring images from the millimeter wavelength imager, and we've talked about the scanners before."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really was just a few weeks ago that we were told that lawyers knew better than to send a clueless cease-and-desist letter... and then we get this story. Apparently a group that is in favor of a certain law that Newt Gingrich opposes sent out a Twitter message that included the @newtgingrich username to stir up some interest in a petition they were working on. This is part of how you use Twitter to communicate with others and get attention from certain people. But apparently Gingrich's lawyer was upset that Gingrich's name was being "used" in a message in favor of a law Gingrich opposes, and sent a ridiculously bad cease-and-desist letter that the folks at the Citizen Media Law Project dubbed: "How to Make Your Client Look Bad, in Three Easy Steps."

First, the lawyer clearly didn't understand Twitter and how it works since using @newtgingrich is the equivalent of sending a public letter "Dear Newt Gingrich" -- which certainly wouldn't be an abuse of his name. Second, the lawyer not only didn't understand Section 230, but insisted that Tucows, the registrar behind the site that hosted the petition (and also republished the tweet) was somehow responsible for the content of the Twitter message: "continued display of the offending tweet 'can expose any and all involved parties (including Twitter, ContactPrivacy.com and/or TuCows) to substantial ongoing, and even personal liability.'" Of course, that's not even close to true. Then, on top of that, the lawyer basically tried to throw in claims on every law he could think up:

trademark infringement, violation of Gingrich's and Anuzis' publicity rights, false advertising, false designation of origin, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage and contractual relations, common law and computer trespass (could Twitter trespass upon its own computer?), conversion, traditional fraud and wire fraud, breach of contract (i.e., Twitter's terms of service), violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and even RICO violations.

All for a Twitter message. Seriously. So, what was that about lawyers knowing better than to send bogus cease-and-desist letters?

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As bombshells go, they don't get much bigger than this: the first video has surfaced of project codename Trico (above), the PS3 followup to Fumito Ueda's Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two games that have helped advance and solidify -- in many minds -- games as high art, and it's just as stark, surreal and beautiful as you might expect. The Austin Game Developers Conference also formally announced that it would be adding an indie games summit to this year's lineup, and has added Offworld to its advisory board, and we saw a new WiiWare game that has you scribbling with a literally magic marker to help guide and protect a boy through its levels. Elsewhere we saw Fallout 3 reimagined as a 70s Japanese TV cop-drama, as more expansions were announced for the game, saw a new game built entirely on and around Google Earth, a new series of official artist-created levels for LittleBigPlanet, and the Team Fortress team taught how to publicly faceplant with grace. Finally, we saw how to kill reams of Hitler clones in a cute 2D world, listened to the last chiptune mixtape you might ever need and a musical theater ode to the buggy world of the original Saints Row, and saw both Metroid by way of Miyazaki, and Silent Hill in real, horrifying, life.

One of the most common DIY LilyPad Arduino uses seems to be in bike wear. I don't know if it's because bike riders like electronics or what, but here's another one! Instructables user kempton made this very attractive cycling jacket with LED buttons, and wrote up a detailed step-by-step tutorial for making your own, complete with turn signals.

More:

• CRAFT Video: LilyPad Arduino Blinking Bike Patch
• CRAFT Video: LilyPad Arduino 101
  
• HOW TO - Make a Turn Signal Bike Jacket

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Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a recent court decision about the rights of online commenters. "Although a court has ruled that the police can subpoena the identities of users who posted comments in a newspaper's blog, I think this is not as big of a threat to journalistic integrity as it might seem. And in any case when the judge ruled against the privacy rights of 'bloggers,' he didn't actually mean 'bloggers.'" Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

In the month of my birth, that is, in March, 1946, Jorge Luis Borges co-authored with Adolfo Casares a very short story, ""Del Rigor en la Ciencia," or "On Exactitude in Science," about a perfect map that's as big as the kingdom which it depicts.

Here's the first half of the story, as translated by Andrew Hurley.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless...

I also found, how great, a video dramatizing the story's ideas, with a sound track of Borges himself reading the story in Spanish.

The full text of the translation of "On Exactitude in Science" is online at the Language Scraps " blog.

And our Universal Library, that is, Wikipedia, has an entry about the Borges story.

After seeing our previous proto pr0n post, Alberto wrote us pointing out the meticulous proto layouts from ChaN. Another great example of much of someone with obvious love for the craft, we've featured several of ChaN's excellent AVR projects in the past - I'm still a big fan of the Wavetable Melody Generator code.

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MAKE contributor Will O'Brien mounted an ATC3K camera into his skiing goggles in order to grab some first-person action shots. He even created an enclosure for most of the electronics -

I thought about some complicated mounting tricks to attache the boxes to the straps, but found that electrical tape worked great. Keep in mind that the cold will drop the voltage on your average alkaline batteries - get some of the lithium AAs or the camera will keep shutting down.

Check out the step-by-step tutorial on Will's site. [via Hack a Day]

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This member of the MAKE Flickr pool added a 555 light-flashing circuit (from Charles Platt's "The Biggest Little Chip" piece in MAKE, Volume 10) to the cover of his Maker's Notebook.

aka_grim_man's photostream

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nemesisrocks writes "The New South Wales government is set to begin testing a device that will limit the speed of drivers because 'excessive speed is one of the primary ways that people are killed while driving.' Located on the dashboard, it senses a driver's speed with the use of GPS. If the speed of a car goes over the posted legal limit, a warning sounds. If the driver ignores the warning, the device eventually cuts all power to the car because a cut-off switch has been installed between the accelerator and the engine." The Times Online reports that the same system will be tested in the UK this summer for use in taxis and buses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perhaps it's a race of some sort to see which country can pass the worst laws related to the internet possible, and France feels that it's falling behind other countries? After approving a "three strikes" law that will kick those accused (not convicted) of file sharing off the internet, someone in our comments reminded us that France is also looking to implement a file sharing tax on ISPs (Google translation) -- even though there's already such a levy on storage media. So... your connection gets taxed in case you're sharing music, your storage gets taxed again for that same shared music... and you can get kicked offline for it anyway.

And then a bunch of folks have pointed out that French politicians are looking to implement new laws that give police the ability to use keylogging software, force ISPs to censor certain sites on a "banned" list, and create a massive database of information on citizens. All of these things have appeared in other forms around the globe. All with great controversy. So it's quite impressive that France is trying to take them on all at once. Who knows if this latest bill will pass, but it really cements the idea that Sarkozy seriously dislikes the internet, and would like to put as many controls on it as possible.

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Along with the K-7 DSLR, Pentax has launched the smc PENTAX-DA 18-55mm F3.5-5.6AL WR and smc PENTAX-DA 50-200mm F4-5.6ED WR weather-resistant lenses. Treated with Super-Protect (SP) coating for dust resistance and designed with environmental sealing, both the lenses complement the latest Pentax weather-resistant DSLRs. Priced at $199.95 USD for the DA 18-55mm and $249.95 USD for the DA 50-200mm, the lenses will start shipping in July 2009.

Pentax has announced the K-7 mid-level DSLR, based around an updated version of the Pentax/Samsung 14.6 MP CMOS sensor. The specifications - magnesium alloy body, 5.2 fps shooting, 720p HD video, 920,000 dot LCD - will not come as a surprise to the Pentax faithful, following comprehensive leaking of its details. However, we've been lucky enough to get hold of a pre-production camera to bring you a detailed hands-on preview of the K-7.

Bydiddo's custom wetsuits come in a variety of retro Kai's Powertools textures, as well as smashing skinless anatomical diagram and fake-shark-bite. I dive a couple times a year and always rent my wetsuits. I'm finally considering buying one -- these are great.

wetsuits (via Geekologie)

langelgjm sends in an update to a story we discussed over the weekend about an extremely well-preserved fossil of an ancient primate, Darwinius masillae, that sheds light on an important area of evolution. The 47 million-year-old specimen has now been officially unveiled, and while many media outlets are stumbling over themselves with phrases like "missing link" and "holy grail," it's clearly a very impressive find. "Discovered two years ago, the exquisitely preserved specimen is not a direct ancestor of monkeys and humans, but hints at what such an ancestor might have looked like. According to researchers, 'The specimen has an unusual history: it was privately collected and sold in two parts, with only the lesser part previously known. The second part, which has just come to light, shows the skeleton to be the most complete primate known in the fossil record.' The scientific article describing the find was published yesterday in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal PLoS ONE. Google's home page is also celebrating the find with a unique image." Science blogger Brian Switek offers some criticism of the academic paper and the media swarm, saying, "I would have hoped that this fossil would receive the care and attention it deserves, but for now it looks like a cash cow for the History Channel. Indeed, this association may not have only presented overblown claims to the public, but hindered good science, as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "Microsoft confirmed that its IIS Web-server software contains a vulnerability that could let attackers steal data, but downplayed the threat, saying 'only a specific IIS configuration is at risk from this vulnerability.' The flaw, which involves how Microsoft's software processes Unicode tokens, has been found to give attackers a way to view protected files on IIS Web servers without authorization. The vulnerability, exposed by Nikolaos Rangos, could be used to upload files as well. Affecting IIS 6 users who have enabled WebDAV for sharing documents via the Web, the flaw is currently being exploited in online attacks, according to CERT, and is reminiscent of the well-known IIS unicode path traversal issue of 2001, one of the worst Windows vulnerabilities of the past decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most makers probably already know of Diana Eng. She was one of the contestants, the so-called "fashion nerd, on the second season of Project Runway. She's also been a guest blogger on CRAFT and is the author of the new book Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech. And Diana Eng is no poser nerd. To prove it, she's here to talk about... ham radio? That's right, Diana is a licensed ham! She loves the hobby and is excited about introducing a new generation of amateurs to it. She'll be contributing some posts here about ham, like this convention report, and doing some radio projects. We're thrilled to have her. Welcome, Diana! - Gareth Branwyn

This weekend was Hamvention in Dayton, OH, the largest Ham gathering of the year, drawing 20,000 attendees from around the world. Hamvention is filled with vendors, exhibitors, forums, a flea market, and amateur radio operators, ready to make an eyeball QSO (face-to-face contact) with fellow operators they've contacted with CW (morse code), RTTY/PSK 31 (data packets), and phone (voice).

Inside the Hara Arena there were five arenas of exhibitors. Major radio vendors Yaesu, Icom, Kenwood showcased their equipment. Alongside were exhibitors showing kits for receivers, transceivers, amplifiers, GPS tracking, tuners, etc.. Hendricks had some really great QRP kits (low power, 5W or less for CW and 10W or less phone). There was custom-made equipment such as keyers for morse code, microphones, antennas, battery packs, and solar panels. EZ Hang created custom sling-shot, fishing reel devices to shoot wire antennas up in trees. Buddipole was a favorite for portable antennas that can be assembled on the go during DXpeditions.

The outdoor flea market had tons of vintage ham radios, various electronics, knick-knacks, and parts. One gentleman was selling Enigma cipher machines that were used to encrypt and decrypt messages during WWII. Winford was there with a nice collection of breadboard adapters and breakout boards. There were some great old Heathkit radios that would be fun to refurbish

.

I enjoyed seeing how everyone operates and checking out the ham fashion especially from the HF Pack group. Most attendees had handheld radios that operate VHF to contact convention ham friends like on walkie-talkies. A lot of hams had portable stations that they wore in backpacks which can be used to make contact all over the world. Some hams brought along their bicycle mobile stations. One guy, WG0AT, is a portable operator who hikes and hams, carrying his gear on goats. At the AMSAT forum Richard Garriott (Lord British) spoke about operating ham radio from aboard the International Space Station. The evenings were social hour; ham clubs hosted hospitality suites in many of the different hotels and I picked up a bottle of Bavarian Ham Spirit from the Bavarian Contest Club (BCC). And, of course, there were many cars outfitted with antennas, and one car outfitted with many antennas.

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As Swedish officials are looking into charges that the judge in The Pirate Bay trial were biased, there's now some concern that the person in charge of figuring out whether he was biased... might be biased as well. Apparently, he serves on a board with the main lawyers who argued the case for the entertainment industry (and two of their main assistants). Of course, in legal circles you do end up getting to know others in the field, but as brokep from The Pirate Bay notes: "Not [that] any of OUR lawyers are on that board. But two of the opponents lawyers in the same board." Considering that officials should be trying to make it clear that there's no bias, it seems like they should pick someone who has no direct ties to the attorneys involved in the case. Brokep also has some fun in noting that it was simple to find this info on Google, and he's surprised that no one else had done such a simple search yet.

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newtley writes "Only days after Brian Toder, her previous legal representative, had decided discretion was the better part of valour, leaving her fend for herself against the RIAA, Jammie Thomas says another lawyer has come forward with an offer of pro bono help. He's K.A.D. Camara from Camara & Sibley in Houston, Texas, says Jammie. And, 'He's the youngest person in history to graduate from Harvard Law school with honors,' she points out. Nor will her retrial be delayed, as was expected. It'll now go forward in June 15, as slated. 'I'm so happy!' Jammie said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're still doing our contests to try and encourage people to sign up for our MAKE channel on Twitter. Here are last week's Maker's Notebook winners:

@allgeektout, @mclightning @ItsUnbelievable, @loriloper, @fusionlin If you haven't DM'd us your mailing address to us on Twitter, do it soon so we can send you a book!

The winner for the Arduino MEGA is: @utahfm

Sign up @make for a chance to win. And BIG THANKS to Dan, Marc, Rob, and everyone in the Maker Shed for making these giveaways available to us!

Going to the Maker Faire? Then sign up for our FaireTraffic channel. We'll be getting in all sorts of in-the-field info from fairgoers about traffic and parking conditions and sending out updates. Twitter will be our sensor net, letting us know what's going on in getting folks into and out of the fair.

Speaking of traveling to the Faire, check out the Get There: Car and Get There: Train/Bus/Bike pages on the Faire site.

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Check out this iPhone-controlled 5x7 laser matrix built using 35 laser pointers, a PIC16F722 microcontroller, some miscellaneous parts, and a custom iPhone app.

Make a Laser Matrix Projector for the iPhone

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Porn magazine publisher Perfect 10 has spent tons of money on a long series of fruitless lawsuits against the operators of search engines. The issue is that people with access to Perfect 10 photos had put them online, and (of course) search engines indexed these and included them in their image search features. Perfect 10 insisted that, since these search engines showed thumbnails of the images, the search engines were liable for the infringement. Except that courts keep throwing these cases out. But, that hasn't stopped Perfect 10. However, all it has to show for it is another loss. In its lawsuit against Amazon, for Amazon's A9 search subsidiary, the court has tossed out the lawsuit, pointing out that the DMCA safe harbors clearly protect Amazon, while also highlighting a bunch of pretty basic mistakes that Perfect 10 made in filing the lawsuit (you would think, having filed so many similar lawsuits, that it would get the specifics right). At some point, the company needs to realize that these lawsuits aren't getting it very far.

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Kieth Olbermann responds to RNC chairman Michael Steele's statement that gay marriage harms the economy by creating a new class of beneficiary spouses by pointing out that gay marriage would likely create more than $16 billion in economic activity for weddings, which benefit local stationers, photographers, bakers, hoteliers, etc. etc. etc.

Keith Olbermann's WTF!?!: RNC's Michael Steele & Gay Marriage (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Bre writes:

We got ABS into the MakerBot store (store.makerbot.com) and Marius and Philip of the Whatever Lab in Vienna were visiting and they set up the MakerBot named Martha Vader to sing the imperial march and make a Darth Vader Head. The force is strong with this one.

Bre will be at Maker Faire in San Mateo:

We're going to be showing up at Maker Faire with 3 makerbots and our plan is to run them straight through the entire Faire cranking out 3D objects from Thingiverse and setting them free into the world.

We're also going to be on a mission to make robot friends with all the other robots at the Faire!

There is really a huge amount of information on the MakerBot blog. Lots of How-Tos and good examples. Open source all the way, though we're going to have to wait for that photographic evidence proving their ultimate open source cred. Maybe a long time...

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An unlikely pair of congressmen politicians -- Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Ralph Nader (Green Party) -- are jointly supporting Right-To-Repair Act of 2009 (H.R. 2057), a law that would make it legal to break the DRM on automotive systems so that independent garages can repair cars even if the manufacturers try to lock them out and then charge high rents to a select few mechanics who are given the crypto keys necessary to read the engine diagnostics:

We're all for promoting competition and consumer choice. But this bill points to a much bigger consumer issue. The problem that this law attempts to fix is the direct result of the use of computers in cars, accompanied by proprietary diagnostic tools and "lock-out codes." Sound familiar? It should, as it's the very sort of thing that can also make it difficult to repair computer systems, sell replacement garage door openers, and refill printer toner cartridges. One underlying legal problem here is the DMCA, which prohibits bypassing or circumventing "technological protection measures."

So while the Right-to-Repair Act of 2009 is legislation that deserves our support, it doesn't help those who repair things other than cars. For example, it won't help Joe Montero, who treks to the Copyright Office every three years to argue for a DMCA exemption to permit the repair and replacement of obsolete and malfunctioning software "dongles," those little hardware devices purportedly intended to prevent software piracy, but which often end up frustrating perfectly legitimate customers.

Right-to-Repair Law Proposed ... for Cars

Why is social media so important? And most importantly, why should you and your company care about? Photo credit: grki In this article, web strategist George Benckenstein explains in very simple, non-technical words, what marketing experts and businessmen have failed to understand about the real value of social media for companies and institutions. Social media is NOT a mean to deliver a superior experience to customers. That's the wrong way to look at it. Social media is simply a mean to get things done. The essence of social media is in the group, the network of people which lies behind it. Well, these people are the best and most effective marketing agents you will ever find. You have made a great new product? Give it out. Let people test it, give you feedback, criticism. That's what social media are for. Finding yourself uneasy when thinking of exposing your product up for criticism in front of so many people? Think again. If you want to buy a new car you are not going to buy what car-makers tell you in their ads, right? You probably ask advice and suggestions to your friends and listen to their car recommendations. How much they like it, whether it is comfortable, issues about the brakes they have heard about, and so on. In the Flat World evangelized by George Benckenstein, people are not anymore subjected to what companies tell them to like or buy. Social media has given everyone the possibility to easily talk to each other, to exchange opinions, while getting rid of all the corporate hype and false promises typical of brand advertising. Here a concise, clear and focused view on why social media are so important for today institutions. Recommended reading:

Social Media vs Institutions

by George Benckenstein
So you think you’ve heard every perspective there is about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE"social media and why companies should take notice? Think again. What I hope you understand after reading this is the true importance of social media and why most companies don’t have a clue as to what it means for their business, customers, employees and their competitors.

Do You Deliver a Superior Customer Experience?

Download the full study here (PDF)
The answer would be NO. Chances are your company is NOT delivering a superior customer experience. So is this what’s important about social media? The answer is… Partially. Now take a moment to consider just what comes between a traditional institution or organization and its customers.

• You have a business with all the internal barriers that exists in all companies.
• Now you have traditional media to communicate with your customers.
• You rely on interruptions and disruptions to message to your clients and potential customers.

Is it any wonder businesses are disconnected from their customers and their experiences?

So What The Hell Does This Have To Do With Social Media?

Social media, or let’s say the platforms created to support it, have created a slight paradigm shift (well maybe a bit more than slight). In order to understand the enormity of this shift, you have to start looking at this phenomena a little differently - from a holistic point of view. This new dynamic has created an environment where communication, collaboration and coordination exist without barriers. It gives power to individuals to compete with institutions at a level unprecedented. Institutional containment as we know it does not exist. Market barriers no longer exist as we know it. Let’s think about social media thru another lens. Let’s look at it around “coordinating effort” or, from the basis any institution is created which is, getting things done. This is what’s important about social media. Institutions and organizations are wondering what to do about social media. Policies are being written, consultants are being brought in to figure out how it can be used as a marketing channel. Companies are missing what’s really important about social media and the platforms that support it - and here it is. Cooperation cost is the economic burden of coordinating effort. Traditionally, the solution for coordinating effort was to create an institution. More recently, since the cost for people to communicate with each other has fallen thru the floor, many are rethinking the system in which people communicate, collaborate and coordinate. A great example of this is found on social networking platforms - platforms where coordination and communication are designed into the system. Systems that allow group output without regard to traditional institutional models.

Looking At Things In New Ways Is Hard To Do

So what does this mean for the traditional institutional model? It means that business leaders have to get comfortable with reviewing something very core - their original purpose - their existence. In the end, I really think there are only 2 choices:

1. Embrace and leverage communication, collaboration and coordination platforms. Institutions and individuals alike all have access to a world of new opportunities. This is difficult because it requires us to forget what we think we know and look at our circumstance dispassionatly and objectively. It will also require us all to get involved and learn. You can’t fake this.
2. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. You might make the connection to the Kübler-Ross model’s 5 discrete stages of how people come to terms with dying. This is how many institutions and organizations will come to terms with these new, communication, collaboration and coordination platforms.

So here we are. This is happening. The ultimate importance of the web is coming to fruition. It’s the ultimate communication platform. It gives institutions the power to outdistance their competition by breaking down communication barriers between their employees, their customers and their suppliers. We all have the power to create personal networks to coordinate effort and accomplish anything. Thomas Friedman said “what can be done, will be done.” There is nothing standing in our way. Let’s get busy getting things done.

Additional Resources On Social Media

• Web 2.0: Ten Ways Non-Profits Can Start Leveraging Social Media
• Social Media Marketing: Widget Examples Of Corporate Uses And Applications
• Social Media Marketing: Video Examples Of Corporate Uses And Applications
• The Social Media Optimization Manifesto: Key Social Marketing Principles To Increase The Visibility Of Your Web Site
• Social Media And US Business Familiarity, Usage And Adoption: A Research Study Of The Inc. 500

Originally written by George Benckenstein for his blog, and first published on April 28th 2009 as "Social Media vs Institutions"

About the author George Benckenstein is a web strategist with lots of experiences as a marketing director and consultant. He's currently manager at Hrtools.com and Administaff Inc. George Benckenstein blogs at www.benckenstein.com.

Photo credits: Looking at Things in New Ways Is Hard to Do - Gunnar Pippel All other images by George Benckenstein

FruitWorm writes in with word of a vulnerability in Java that has been patched by everyone but Apple. "Security researchers say that Mac OS X users are vulnerable to a critical, 6-month-old, remote vulnerability in Java, a component that is enabled by default in Web browsers on this platform. Julien Tinnes notes that this vulnerability differs from typical Java security flaws in that it is 'a pure Java vulnerability' and doesn't involve any native code. It affected not only Sun's Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK, on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. 'This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers,' Julien wrote. This bug was demonstrated during the Pwn2own security challenge this year at CanSecWest, but the details were not made public at that time. Tinnes recommends that Mac OS X users disable Java in their browsers until Apple releases a security update."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission is mulling over guidelines that would require bloggers to disclose when they're writing about products they've been given, sponsor's products, or are getting paid to write about a particular product. The FTC says the new rules are necessary because people are increasingly turning to blogs for product information, and their unregulated nature makes them ripe for abuse. But the things the FTC proposes, like mandated disclosure when a company has given a blogger a product, are things that most reasonable bloggers already do. Meanwhile, those who accept payment for posts -- as well as the companies doing the paying aren't likely to have much credibility with their audiences anyway. It's as if the FTC is trying to mandate credibility, and this raises a couple of interesting points. First, audiences generally seem pretty adept at rooting out when people are being paid to talk nice about a company or product, and there are plenty of examples of company's payola schemes getting found out and causing a backlash against them. Second, why do bloggers get singled out for special treatment? Plenty of old-media reporters get freebies tossed their way, but the FTC doesn't seem to think they deserve the same level of attention. That's not to say that newspapers are full of paid-placement articles or reports based on free products, but to think there's more scope for deception and advertiser influence on blogs than in any sort of print or other media is fallacious.

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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A bunch of folks have sent in a proposal by Paul Venezia at Infoworld, suggesting a special "Technology Bill of Rights." While I actually tend to agree with a lot of what he talks about preserving in this Bill of Rights (online anonymity, net neutrality -- especially if there's no competition, and a right to make copies of content you bought, software used for public policy needs to have its source available, etc.) I don't see how it helps to necessarily have it set as a special "Bill of Rights" (not that anyone is seriously considering it). Instead, many of these issues seem like ones that we should strive for through good competition in the market, not enforce by any sort of law.

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blackbearnh writes "We all know that slow Web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences working on some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the home page and Live Search. In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior. 'In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning... was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site.' He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rohan Sharma and Jeff Buente, at Cornell University, posted detailed notes on their haptic vision project:

The ultrasonic haptic vision system enables a person to navigate hallways and around large objects without sight, through the use of an ultrasonic rangefinder that haptically interfaces with the user via tiny vibrating motors mounted on the user's head. The idea behind this project was to construct a sixth sensory system that interacts with the body in an intuitive and user friendly fashion and enables the user to navigate without vision.

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From USA Today: "More than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." Michael "DHS" Chertoff is now charging for advice on how not to get screwed by the DHS (the former director of the CIA is working for him); Ashcroft is working for companies that his own DoJ brought anti-trust charges against. Nice work if you can get it.

Several Bush officials work in areas related to former jobs

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's got some exciting news about the possibility of replacing laptop fans with silent ionic cooling systems. My laptop runs as loud and hot as a jet-engine, as does my wife's -- add to that the noise from the consoles and the PVR and our living room sounds like the inside of a wave-machine.

Tessera's ionic cooler sits near a vent inside the laptop. Heat pipes, which transfer heat using the evaporation and condensation of a fluid, draw heat away from the computer's processing units and toward the ionic-cooling system. Inside the ionic-cooling device are two electrodes: one that ionizes air molecules such as nitrogen, and another that acts as a receiver for those molecules. When a voltage is applied between the two electrodes, the ions flow from the emitter electrode to the collector. As they move, their momentum pushes neutral air molecules across a hot spot, cooling it down...

The system can extract roughly 30 percent more heat from a laptop than a conventional fan can, and lab tests show that it could potentially consume only half as much power, the company says...

Ionic-Cooling Laptop

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The new US credit-card bill specifies a minimum type-size and a list of approved fonts for the terms and conditions, to replace the mind-clouding teeny-weeny eye-strain-o-rama font that normally fills a Bible-sized tome that accompanies your standard credit card.

Section 122 of the Truth in Lending Act (U.S.C. 1632) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:

"(d) Minimum type-size and font requirement for credit card applications and disclosures. -All written information, provisions, and terms in or on any application, solicitation, contract, or agreement for any credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan, and all written information included in or on any disclosure required under this chapter with respect to any such account, shall appear-

"(1) in not less than 12-point type; and

"(2) in any font other than a font which the Board has designated, in regulations under this section, as a font that inhibits readability.".

H. R. 627 (via Kottke)

Instructables user wolfsshade used hardware store parts to make this homemade ripstik (a center-swiveling skateboard). Looks nice, like more of a skateboard than futuristic hovercraft.

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While it took many months since Congress made it clear that NebuAd's somewhat sneaky clickstream tracking/behavioral advertising plans were almost certainly illegal, it appears that the company has finally shut down completely. The similar Phorm remains in operation in the UK, but is still facing significant legal scrutiny and has been running around trying to convince everyone that it's system doesn't violate anyone's privacy. Either way, there's a good lesson to be learned: while it may seem that individuals don't pay all that much attention to their privacy rights, if you cross the line and abuse what people feel is sacred, it's going to come back to bite you.

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eldavojohn writes "Wired has a piece on the new City of Heroes content that is created by players — or rather the severe abuse of it. Namely, creating missions for the characters. The problem is that gamers game this system, even though Paragon City has tried to maintain a good risk/reward ratio for experience in these missions. Making the situation even worse is that people who architect highly-rated missions get architect awards, which are redeemable for prizes — almost ensuring experience farming missions. Eric Heimburg (lead engineer and producer of Asheron's Call and the upcoming Star Trek MMO) comments on this: 'It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player's overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that's the truth. Once you reached that top of the hill, if there's nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.' Matt Miller (lead designer of CoH), addressed the community on this very topic. This is resulting in an unexplained ban/loss of experience if you are determined to be abusing the mission architect, causing an uproar in the community. Is user-generated content a dead end for an MMORPG?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 15-minute test-cast that turned into a mini-episode. Jay asked Dave to explain why it was so important that the NYT has a River of News.

We're now using the full-blown Blogtalk Radio system, this was just a test to make sure we knew what we were doing after Sunday's disaster.

However the feed stays the same, you can follow us in your podcatcher or iTunes.

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

I finished a new painting this week, seemingly just a still life of a geranium---often I paint more surreal kinds of things, as you can see on my paintings site.

With this geranium I did, however, have something extra in mind, that is, I'm working on a kind of urban fantasy/sf novel called Jim and the Flims, and my characters are about to make their way to the castle of the King of Flimsy.

[Somewhat irrelevant picture of a beautiful neon sign.]

I should mention that Flimsy is an alternate world that is, I think, our afterworld, kind of medieval and bucolic---and I had the idea that the castle could look like a giant geranium. Those leaves are thick, you see, with rooms in them, and the flims (that is, the denizens of flimsy) are buzzing around them like gnats, only too small to see in the painting---that's the part I need the word-processor for!

You can hear me reading a draft of the first chapter of Jim and the Flims at my Feedburner podcast station, which you can access by clicking the button below.

As for painting and writing, Charlie Jane Anders has a nice article, "SF Writers Make Art," in the io9 SF site, featuring interviews with SF writers who paint, including me, Audrey Niffenegger, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

Back in February, Universal Music got slapped down for its highly questionable attempt to sue the investors in Veoh for the actions performed by the company itself. We've never quite understood why the major record labels have tried, repeatedly, to sue the investors of sites and services they don't like. It's hard to see how that's justified, because if those investors are found liable, it would create a huge liability for any investor. Investors don't have day-to-day control over a company, and trying to make them liable for the actions of the company makes no sense. However, not only was Universal shot down in this attempt, but it tried to refile the lawsuit against the investors... and was shot down yet again. The judge noted that Universal Music presented no evidence as to why the investors should somehow be responsible for the actions of the company and tossed out the lawsuits against them again. Hopefully this wakes up EMI, who recently sued the investors in a small startup as well.

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A bunch of folks have been sending in the story about Charles Nesson's plans in the Tenenbaum case to try a "fair use" defense, claiming that even if Tenenbaum shared content, it was fair use. There didn't seem to be much to comment on it, as this argument was ably dismantled last month by Nesson's own expert witness list. However, since he's going forward with it, I'll add my voice to the chorus of voices who all point out that this seems extremely unlikely to succeed. Even if you believe file sharing should be fair use, it's hard to see how the law would agree, as is currently written (and given other court decisions). In fact, if you want to argue that file sharing isn't a violation of copyright law, I think Nesson would be better off following Andrew Bridge's assertion that if you read copyright law literally, it only applies to material objects, not digital ones (seriously, go read the post to get the details). Unfortunately, again, the courts have traditionally ignored that argument entirely. The original claims by Nesson for Tenenbaum, about the unconstitutionality of the statutory fines, was an interesting argument that seemed to at least have some basis in law (though, even then, the chances of winning seemed slim). To argue that file sharing somehow is fair use just seems like an incredibly unlikely position to win, and pushing that argument will likely create a ruling that sets a dangerous precedent around fair use.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that a few weeks ago the Court rendered a detailed decision providing for safeguards in connection with the RIAA's proposed inspection of the defendant's hard drive in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The decision instructed the RIAA to submit a proposed protective order consistent with the Court's decision. The RIAA submitted a proposed protective order yesterday, which attracted some thoughtful commentary by readers of my blog, but today the Court rejected the RIAA's suggested order, explicitly rejecting many of the 'enhancements' included by the RIAA, including production of 'videos' and 'playlists' which might be found on the hard drive. Instead the Court entered an order the Court itself had drafted. The Court explained that 'the purpose of compelling inspection is to identify information reasonably calculated to provide evidence of any file-sharing of Plaintiffs' copyrighted music sound files conducted on the Defendant's computer. Once this data is identified by the computer forensic expert... any disclosure shall flow through the Defendant subject to his assertion of privilege and the Court's authority to compel production, just as disclosure would occur in any other pre-trial discovery setting... (1) As should have been clear from the Court's May 6, 2009 Order, although the Plaintiffs may select experts of their choosing, these individuals are not to be employees of the Plaintiffs or their counsel, but must be third-parties held to the strictest standards of confidentiality; (2) the inspection is limited to music sound files, metadata associated with music sound files, and information related to the file-sharing of music sound files — it shall not include music "playlists" or any other type of media file (e.g., video); (3) the Examining Expert shall be required to disclose both the methods employed to inspect the hard drive and any instruction or guidance received from the Plaintiffs.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damien Hirst was sued by the company that makes the 14-inch Young Scientist Anatomy Set for his giant sized replica of the same, but it was so worth it.

Giant Anatomy

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

UPDATE: Astronaut Scott Parazynski, the astronaut whose climb we followed in yesterday's episode of Boing Boing Video with Miles O'Brien, has reached the summit of Mt. Everest! Read more about their trumphant ascent here, including the GPS devices they're using to track and publish the effort. He tried this last year, but was injured when he was very, very close to reaching the summit -- so this success, a year later, is all the more sweet. Congrats, Scott!