An anonymous reader writes "Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

I took these photos on the set of an adult movie in the San Fernando Valley this April. It was April 10th, to be exact. Which is my birthday. Why I was on the set of an adult movie on my birthday is another story altogether. The story of my life.

The location was a hideous brown building in Canoga Park, not far from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, where rocket engines are built and in front of which sits a giant rocket engine as if it has fallen out of the sky. Both sides of the soundstage were lined with themed rooms: a shower room, a weight room, a sex dungeon. That day's scene would take place on one of the ugliest adult movie sets that I have ever seen: pea soup-colored walls, a diarrhea-colored leather sofa, a faux wood floor. All the flowers were fake.

The name of the movie was "Interactive Sex with Tori Black." The director explained: "We were going to go with 'Existential Musings of a Porn Star,' but we thought we'd dumb it down. If you want to have sex with Tori Black and don't have chloroform, this is your next best option."

Tori is 20 and very pretty. She has long brown hair and long tan legs. When she came out of the dressing room for her scene, wearing pink lingerie and matching pink high-heels, she said: "And here we go." Then she said: "Off to work."

Her co-star was James Deen, who is the hipster generation's answer to Dirk Diggler. He's 23 and has been doing porn since he was 18. When I asked him if he had had sex with 1,000 women in his lifetime thus far, he looked down, thought for a moment, and replied: "More than that."

While the director filmed, Tori and James went at it like dogs. Even when he stopped shooting, they kept going. It was impressive. It was Olympic. It was also Passover. In between shots, all the crew guys standing around and watching kept making jokes about Deen being Jewish and what they called his "Hobbit feet." Deen ignored them.

When it was time for the money shot, which in the business is referred to as the "pop shot," somebody called out: "Actually, he can't pop until sundown." After that, everybody got very quiet and respectful while Deen delivered his closing shot. Then they burst into a rousing rendition of "Hava Nagila," and everybody clapped.

Afterward, Tori checked her face in the mirror. She told me that the heavy makeup makes her face break out. I thought it was the pop shot. But what do I know? I guess you learn something new every day.

Well, this is rather incredible. EMI was one of the major labels that, for a brief period of time, seemed like it might actually have figured stuff out. You see, it got taken over by some folks from outside the recording industry, and they talked about how they needed to pay attention to experiments like Radiohead's and learn how to better respond to customer desires like that. That was two years ago. The company was also the first of the major labels to dump DRM. It then pulled back on its support for the RIAA and IFPI (after threatening to withdraw completely), saying that the strategy of suing fans was a dead end. On top of all that, it hired some Silicon Valley techies. For a while, we actually thought EMI might be the most interesting of the major record labels to follow.

But... old habits die really hard, apparently. The company has been suing pretty much every innovative startup that comes along, often targeting execs personally in attempts to bankrupt them. Sometimes it's been going after hobbyists or investors beyond just the actual companies. Often times, the company seems to be negotiating with innovators on the one hand, while filing unexpected lawsuits at the same time. One of the key techies it hired, Doug Merrill from Google, left after less than a year. More recently, the company refused to agree to more reasonable (but still high) streaming rates to get music back on YouTube in the UK.

Basically, it appears that EMI said it wanted to do something new, but couldn't resist doing everything it could to snuff out innovation. It takes more than words to actually convince both consumers and musicians that you're really adapting. Is it any wonder that people aren't fans? EMI's CEO is now admitting that the company "lost touch" with consumers:

"Music is in demand and the demand is growing all the time, but we've clearly lost touch with our consumers. I passionately believe that if we listen to our consumers, this gap will become our opportunity."

Ok, so start listening! STOP SUING INNOVATORS. Stop suing executives and investors in those innovators. Stop using lawsuits as a negotiation tactic. Start focusing on giving fans what they want. Start focusing on enabling new business models that work for artists. Stop thinking about getting a transaction on every piece of music played, but start looking at ways to use the music to create additional products people want to buy. Stop trying to limit users and limit musicians. Enable them both. Also, over a year ago, Topspin's Ian Rogers wrote a brilliant open letter to EMI execs suggesting a rather smart way it could leverage its existing artist relationships. It doesn't seem like EMI listened at all.

If EMI wants help in listening, why not contact some of us who have been presenting solutions and showing what works? We're not that hard to reach, and I'm sure plenty of folks in our community would be more than willing to provide some incredibly useful suggestions.

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CNETNate writes "The world's first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It's the work of a unique camera called 'Minoru,' which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City is spending a million bucks on typewriters over the next three years. Apparently the NYPD is working toward computerizing everything, but they're just not there yet. So Swintec office equipment is on contract to provide manual and electrics, and maintenance, for the foreseeable future. From UPI:

Most of the city's arrest forms have been computerized, but property and evidence vouchers printed on carbon-paper forms still require the use of typewriters.

"It just doesn't make sense that we can't enter these (vouchers) on computer," a police officer told the newspaper.

Dr. Edith Linn, a retired New York police officer and professor of criminal justice at the city's Berkeley College, said many of the 500 police officers she interviewed for a study told her the outdated equipment makes them less likely to perform arrests for minor offenses.

"NYPD typewriter bill nearly $1 million" (via Orange Crate Art)

Citizen Media Law alerts us to a rather troubling "state of the media journalism" report issued by FCC commissioner Michael Copps. While the report doesn't really mean anything right now, it's seen as an indicator of where the FCC may go in its rule-making process. And if that's the case, it's quite troubling, though the old school newspaper folks screaming for protection may find it comforting. Basically, it focuses on "the decline of traditional print and broadcast outlets" and seems to blame the combination of "the internet and bloggers" with the deregulation of media ownership.

This makes almost no sense, and is, in fact, contradictory. The rise of "the internet and bloggers" has massively increased the diversity of people involved in reporting and distributing the news. The barriers of entry to being a journalist have been lowered to almost nothing at all, and people have flooded the market. Copps views that as a problem, but apparently doesn't note the total contradiction in then immediately lamenting the decrease in diversity of journalists in traditional media jobs:

"We're not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism," he said. "Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that's certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists."

What's really troubling is that he seems to think this is a problem that the FCC needs to fix. This certainly seems to go well beyond the FCC's mandate, and it takes an impressive amount of conceptual blindness not to see that the solution is exactly what he described was a part of the problem.

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kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kpoole55 writes "I've been googling for an answer to a question and I'm not making much progress. The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images. There are many programs, free and costly, CLI or GUI oriented, for finding visually similar images — but I'm looking for a next step in the process. It's known that saving the same source image in JPEG format at different quality levels produces different images, the one at the lower quality having more JPEG artifacts. I've been trying to find a method to compare two visually similar JPEG images and select the one with the fewest JPEG artifacts (or the one with the most JPEG artifacts, either will serve.) I also suspect that this is going to be one of those 'Well, of course, how else would you do it? It's so simple.' moments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm looking forward to seeing Know Your Mushrooms, a documentary by Ron Mann (who also directed Comic Book Confidential).

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.

Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…

When I was young my grandmother would take my family on mushroom hunting trips. She really knew her mushrooms. Once when we were in the woods, my mother and grandmother got into an argument about whether or not a mushroom they'd found was poisonous. My mother said it was poisonous and my grandmother said it wasn't. To make her point, my grandmother ate the mushroom on the spot. (I have to assume she was right, because she lived to be 107.)

Last week in Colorado, my mother (who knows her mushrooms too, just not as well as her mother did) found and dried some mushrooms. Photos here.

Know Your Mushrooms documentary

Billy Shire Fine Arts in Culver City, CA is hosting an exhibition of Lou Beach's extraordinary collage work.

Shown here, World Of Men C, 15" x 19",$2800

Exhibition: July 11, 2009 - August 1, 2009

Lou Beach show at Billy Shire Fine Arts

Moon Workstation writes "In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the U.S. Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others." (MySQL among them.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US, thankfully, still hasn't allowed copyright on databases. There's been a push over the years to allow such a database right, but this is problematic for a variety of reasons -- mainly that it's effectively a way to allow the copyrighting of facts, so long as you put a few of them together. But a bigger issue is that there's empirical evidence that the ability to copyright a database doesn't create more databases or actually help businesses. It does the opposite. It limits business -- exactly the opposite of copyright's stated purpose. If we actually had an empirically driven copyright system, there wouldn't be database rights, because the evidence that they do more harm than good is quite clear. Anyone actually pushing for a database right is either ignorant of the evidence or is hoping to profit off such a right by limiting the market.

So it was of great concern to me when I saw a blog post from a lawyer suggesting that the US courts may be effectively allowing a database right on rating data. Beyond the troubling nature of the case, the lawyer who wrote that post also claimed that database holders might finally be "getting the protection they so desperately deserve, and need." Neither of those points is true. Database creators neither deserve nor need protection -- and the evidence on that is quite clear. The database industry in the US has been thriving without such protections, while places in Europe that do have such a right have seen significantly limited growth in those industries, with the data being a lot more expensive and a lot less useful. There is simply no compelling reason why such protectionism is needed unless one wants to simply ignore all empirical evidence.

Then, as you dig into the details of the actual case, you begin to realize what a poorly reasoned and dangerous decision this is, effectively allowing copyright to be expanded to data itself. Eric Goldman does a masterful job detailing the many, many, many problems with this decision. His description of the basics of the case make it clear how ridiculous the outcome is:

A Colorado judge has reached the remarkable conclusion that a hospital publicizing its star ratings and other recognition from a third party rating service in its marketing material might be committing copyright and trademark infringement. This is a little like saying that it could be copyright and trademark infringement for a law school to include its US News rankings in its marketing material or for a book publisher to issue a press release announcing its ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. CRAZY.

Goldman goes on to break down exactly where and how the judge went wrong on every single aspect of the ruling, touching on copyright, trademark and breach of contract. You should read his whole discussion, but here's the excerpt on copyright:

Let me start with a basic proposition. A single numerical value can never be copyrighted. Ever. I don't care what formula produced the value; I don't care how many digits the number has; I don't care what explanatory text is used to describe the value. I know cases occasionally have reached the absurd result that individual numerical values can be copyrighted, including one of my least favorite copyright cases of all time, the CDN v. Kapes Ninth Circuit case. They are wrong wrong WRONG.

Courts can reach this erroneous conclusion by treating a numerical output as a "compilation" of underlying data values. If you squint, you can almost see how this makes sense. The publisher chooses the underlying values to include, uses editorial judgment to build the algorithm crunching those values, and sometimes layers subjective judgments on top of the algorithm's output. However attractive this logic is, I think fundamentally misreads the copyright statute's definition of "compile." Under the copyright act, a compilation must represent a "collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged." When a single number distills but obscures the underlying numerical values, the single number cannot reflect a selection, coordination or arrangement of the underlying numbers. Thus, according to my argument, numerical values cannot be compiled unless the reader can see those underlying values directly.

In this case, the judge gets led astray by contemplating the idea/expression dichotomy as a spectrum with "discoveries" on one end and "expression" on the other. Because the ratings aren't discoveries, the court concludes they should qualify as expression. But the court's dichotomy is fatally incomplete. Instead, the inquiry is whether a single numerical value can represent an original work of authorship because it expresses an idea. A single numerical value cannot express an idea any more than a single word ever could.

Even if one reaches the incredible conclusion that a single numerical value is an original work of authorship, then surely it is preempted from copyright coverage by the merger doctrine, which says that if there are a limited number of ways to express a fact or idea, then the idea and expression merge into a single uncopyrightable whole. It seems like the star ratings in a 1-3-5 star rating system would, by definition, be subject to merger. Sorry to state the obvious, but how many ways are there to express that someone is rated one star??? Nevertheless, this court distorts the merger doctrine by saying the idea being expressed here is the rankings of healthcare providers. This is too high a level of conceptual generality. If every judge used this level of abstraction, the merger doctrine always would be a null set.

Goldman also explains why such a dreadful ruling, which seems to go against common sense and the law in nearly every way, may set a terrible precedent and get used in other cases:

If other courts follow this judge's "logic," the potential for mischief from cases like this is enormous. Think of every reputational system that spits out a numerical assessment of the subjects it evaluates. Now, assume each and every one of those numbers is copyrighted. Individual eBay feedback scores? Individual FICO scores? Individual Billboard rankings of songs and albums? All possibly copyrighted and requiring the initial publisher's consent to republish. Add in potential trademark claims, and the crazy-o-meter goes off the charts.

Ugh. This is a bad and dangerous ruling all around. And as you can see from our original link to the case, there are some other lawyers who think it's exactly on track. That's a bad, bad sign. Hopefully this ruling doesn't stand for very long.

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Clay Roe says:

While browsing for horn modifications for my '08 Honda Civic Hybrid, I came across this extreme body modification to a 1992 Honda Civic CX. It may look like an Aptera's older road-weary brother; but the builder claims to have increased his drag coefficient from 0.34 to 0.17! Resulting in over 90 mpg! Just like my expensive hybrid!*"

* - (With the wind. Downhill. With the AC off.)

Home-made super-aerodynamic Honda Civic

leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just a reminder that the Officially Unofficial Maker Faire Africa is scheduled to take place August 14-16 in Accra, Ghana. We hope to have some people on the ground there and will be covering it here on Make: Online. If you want to keep abreast of Faire happenings, they have a blog on the MFA website. They're also looking for donations to help make the fair happen. There's a donation widget on the main page.

Maker Faire Africa

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Over the years, we've been threatened with lawsuits a few too many times -- almost always due to something that someone said in our comments. The pace of those threats has certainly increased over the years, but most are nothing more than angry bluster. In the few cases where it appears to be someone serious, we have our lawyers explain to them Section 230 in rather plain language, noting that suing us for something said by others in our forums will (1) get thrown out of court incredibly quickly and (2) probably only serve to bring a lot more attention to the comments they're so pissed off about. To date, this has always worked quite well.

Of course, other countries don't have Section 230 safe harbors, and so you get a lot more ridiculous lawsuits with someone blaming a forum owner for what people say in that forum. Hopefully, common sense prevails in those cases too... but you never know. A bunch of folks have sent in the story of a lawsuit in Australia where a filmmaker is suing some online forums for comments in those forums that the filmmaker believes cost him a job. Apparently, some folks agreed to a deal with him to produce a certain movie, but after finding those comments, they pulled out of the deal.

First of all, the filmmaker, Greg Smith, appears to be suing the wrong parties. Rather than those who actually made the comments, he's suing the owners of the web forums where the comments occurred. And, on top of that, he never contacted those forum owners about the comments in the first place (at least one says that the first he knew about the complaints was when the lawsuit was filed -- at which point he immediately removed the comments anyway). And, of course, all this has really served to do is call a lot more attention to the comments about Smith (and the way he handles such things).

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Here's a nice time-lapse video simulation depicting the probable past and possible future of the Earth's land masses, "650 Million Years In 1:20 Minutes." (via CT2)

This original, unopened 1967 Star Trek oil paint-by-numbers is for sale on eBay. It could be yours for just $1800! The seller has a slew of Star Trek memorabilia for sale.

Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn shared this photo of a man who brought a small black & white television and a converter box into a Starbucks.

Dude in Starbucks watching black-and-white TV with converter box!

jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Handmade Music NYC is back at it with an awesome lineup for tonight, complete with unusual sounds, instruments, and interfaces. Have a look at a couple of the projects in attendance -

The Crudbox Sequencer -

CrudBox is a hardware step sequencer which replaces digitally created or analog synthesized sounds typically associated with sequencers and electronic music with the amplified sounds of whatever electronic or electromechanical devices are plugged into it. Solenoids and motors can be plugged in and sequenced while striking or otherwise moving or vibrating any physical material and their sounds amplified in real time using contact mics. These mics, or any other sound source, can be plugged into hacked guitar pedals and effects boxes which can then also be sequenced by CrudBox. Cassette decks, reel to reels, turntables, power tools, and any other sound generating devices can also be hacked and sequenced.

LOOOP-R: Original Audiovisual Hardware -

Loop-R is a real-time video performance tool based in the exploration of low-tech, used technology and human engineering research.

With this tool its author is giving a shout to industry, using existing and mistreated technology in innovative ways, combining concepts and interfaces: merging segregated interfaces (GUI and physical devices) into one.

Hardware and software blend themselves into a new genre providing free control of video-loops in an expressive hybrid tool.

Check out the full lineup here.

Handmade Music NYC
7/16/09 - 7:30 pm - FREE
Hosted by 3rd Ward, Brooklyn: Directions
Sponsored by 3rd Ward, createdigitalmusic.com, XLR8R.com, Make Magazine, and Etsy.com

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Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

I don't know about you but I am feeling kind of bad about those poor Goldman Sachs investment bankers. Just a few months ago they looked so sad (remember those sad guys on the trading floor?). And now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, after taking money from American taxpayers, they earn huge profits as if the credit crunch never happened. The 29,400 Goldmanites are expected to take in on average around $800,000 in pay, bonuses, and benefit packages. I can only imagine what this means for the top 400. But I worry that this is just not going to make them happy. And this is because research on happiness reveals some surprising things:

• Wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but not thereafter (Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness.)

• The bewildering array of choices that wealth brings not only doesn't make us happier but actually erodes our psychological well-being. (Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice)

• Spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. (Dunn et al., Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness)

So I want to humbly suggest that for the purposes of ensuring Goldmanites' happiness, they give large portions of their money to those impoverished by the recession, thus making themselves and others a bit happier. Spread a bit of that happiness contagion. What do you think?

Scott Dennis is the science fiction world's gift to sartori, a wandering t-shirt salesman whom I've run into at conventions on three continents. He'd just expanded his line of Ctholoid tees, adding this Cthulhu vs. the White House Capitol design that I'm very fond of indeed.

Cthulhu And Friend Designs

Here's a really fascinating piece on the BBC about NASA programmer Don Eyles and the team behind the infamous AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer). Don was only 23 when he got the gig. Maybe it was good that he was young and naive. As he says: "I don't recall the risk and the responsibility and the fact that other people's lives were to some extent in our hands."

There are few instances in which I'm happy to be as old as I am. The fact that I got to live through and be an active observer (aka space geek!) during the Apollo program is one of those times. I still get chills reliving some of that footage.

There's a great jargon term in here, too: "LOL memory." It stands for "Little Old Lady memory" and refers to the "rope core memory" used in the AGC that required teams of (women) employees to weave meters and meters of copper wire around magnetic cores.

Weaving the way to the Moon [Thanks, Brian Jepson and Mike Loukides!]

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I have to admit that it's been really kind of sad to watch journalists with little understanding of economics or business flail around blaming the likes of Craigslist and Google (especially Google) for their own failure in building better business models. The latest is a well-written, but poorly thought-out and argued, piece by Peter Osnos, the Vice-Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, suggesting reasons why Google needs to pay up its "fair share" to newspapers. There are numerous problems with the logic in the piece, but they can be summarized in two basic camps: a misunderstanding of the internet and a misunderstanding of economics.

The great thing, by the way, is that the comments on the article highlight pretty much every mistake that Osnos makes -- and, of course, as is oh-so-typical in these situations, Osnos does nothing at all to engage or respond to the comments that call out his mistakes. You want to know why newspapers are failing? It's not because of Google, it's because of this viewpoint that some journalists still hold that they're the masters of the truth, handing it out from on high, wanting nothing at all to do with the riff raff in the comments.

So, what's wrong specifically with the article? Well, he uses as his basis the idea that cable companies (and their subscribers, really) pay TV networks to be carried in cable packages, and suggests that Google should be doing the same thing -- paying newspapers as if they were networks. Of course, there are a few problems there. Television is a broadcast medium with a limit on what can be provided. The economics are entirely different than a communications medium with unlimited "space" for content. Suggesting the two are the same is simply wrong. The economics are entirely different. In one case, you have significant scarcities in terms of what gets "offered." That's not the case with the internet. Ignoring that destroys Osnos' entire argument.

Even more to the point, as one of the commenters to Osnos, Kimota, notes: "It's interesting that cable television was held up as a good example of how to extract subscription fees for content. The American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan said in 2007 that cable and satellite TV suffered 'the lowest level of customer satisfaction among all industries covered.'" When your idea of how to save the newspaper business is to take a model mostly beloved by consumers and ask it to mimic a model almost universally hated... that's a problem, right?

The second big problem with Osnos' analysis is that he doesn't appear to understand how Google makes its money. He simply looks at the fact that it's making a ton of money, while newspapers are not, and assumes that Google's actions draw in the money that should have gone to newspapers (hence the "unfairness"). But as Scott Rosenberg notes in the comments again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google makes its money, which has little to nothing to do with news, but in targeted advertisements on transactional searches (searches where people are looking to buy something):

Google makes its money mostly from targeted advertising on product searches and other narrow, directed searches. The advertising on news-related searches is not nearly as valuable. Google could remove all newspapers and journalism content from its Web search catalog tomorrow and lose very little of its revenue. The links to news it provides are valuable to its users but not terribly valuable to its advertisers.

Finally, Osnos makes another big mistake, common among newspaper folks, that whoever breaks the news is obviously the most valuable source. Yet, as we were just discussing, being first doesn't always mean that you have the most useful information. Related to this, Osnos complains specifically about how Sports Illustrated broke a story, but Google News pointed more people to the Huffington Post coverage of that particular story, stating:

Most galling was that The Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.... Why did The Huffington Post come up ahead of SI.com? Because, even Google insiders concede, Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines. What angered the people at Sports Illustrated and Time Inc. is that Google, acting as traffic conductor, seemed unmoved by their grievance over what had happened to their ownership of the story. An SI editor quoted to me Time Inc's editor-in-chief, John Huey, noting crisply that, "talking to Google is like trying to talk to a television."

This, of course, is a gross distortion of reality, and implies totally incorrectly that somehow the Huffington Post has some power over Google that SI.com could not replicate. The fact that Sports Illustrated and other publications have made bad decisions in optimizing their content isn't Google's fault. It's their own fault. Here, let me put this in terms that old "paper" folks might get: If more people go to my store than your store because I put a better ad in the Yellow pages, it's not the fault of the Yellow pages publisher. It's your fault for having a crappy ad. By doing a better job optimizing its content, the Huffington Post effectively better "advertised" itself to Google.

Of course, old school publications like Sports Illustrated could just as easily do the same thing themselves, but they haven't. On top of that, they could offer more useful features and services that attract more people such that they specifically seek out SI's coverage. But, instead, they treat the community the same way Osnos seems to: the riff raff can comment, but they aren't a part of the "real conversation" that occurs outside of the community.

Osnos wants fairness, but the system is amazingly fair. Much more fair than it ever was in the past, in fact. The problem isn't about "fairness." It's about Osnos being upset that in a level playing field pretty much everyone but the newspapers have figured out how to play the game better. What's fair is that the newspapers haven't been able to adjust and their revenue and readership is reflecting that.

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Qs wrote up an instructable for his "Musicator Jr.", an LED light organ about the size of a 9V battery -

The 'brains' of this project is a LM358 general-purpose op-amp which costs under 30-cents. The first half of the circuit is an amplifier which boosts the 500-micro-volts from an electret mic to about 1-volt. This level is generally called 'Line-level' and can be used to drive our LEDs, an audio amp, or even the input pins of an Arduino processor.

The second half of the op-amp is used as a voltage-to-current converter, which limits the brightness of the LEDs to 10mA or less.

Nice and simple build with plenty of 'wow-factor' for those who see you wearing it! Check out the full step-by-step here.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's motion to keep secret the record companies' 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a 'protective order motion' asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion: 'the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs' competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Electronic Frontier Foundations has opened the nominations for its annual Pioneer Award, given to "leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology." Of all the awards I've ever received, the Pioneer is the one I'm proudest of. It's independently juried by a group of tech luminaries who take public nominations and then deliberate.

The EFF Pioneer Awards were established to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Each year we field nominations from the EFF community -- now is your opportunity to nominate a deserving individual or group to receive a Pioneer Award for 2009!

Nominate a Pioneer for EFF's 2009 Pioneer Awards!

Ssquared22 writes "It may feel like a rip-off to some, but you've got to admit that paying $30 for Gears of War 2 sure beats paying $60! Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them, and companies like Gamestop continue to laugh all the way to the bank. In an article at Crispy Gamer, David Thomas dissects one of the most critical issues in gaming today: used games and merchants (online and brick-and-mortar) who specialize in this 'sleight of hand.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I saw a couple of days ago on Consumerist that a teen had apparently discovered a debit of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on her debit card for a purchase at the local drug store. That's $23 quadrillion -- or 2,000 times the national debt. CNN is now reporting that a bunch of folks were hit with this charge (the identical number). Most are also dealing with insufficient funds charges. Visa, not surprisingly, is apologetic, promising to sort things out and agreeing to get rid of any excess charges due to this. However, it does make you wonder... shouldn't Visa's debit cards have some sort of "reality check" included?

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Every single ingredient in this homemade oatmeal stout and Heath Bar ice cream is off my diet. Still, I want.

This was a total success, if I do say so myself. The ice cream base has a slight bitter flavor but also a bit of a toffee flavor from the stout. The sweetness of the Heath bar is a good foil to that bitterness while the toffee in it helps bring out more of that toffee flavor. The texture of the ice cream is beautifully creamy making a good base for the crunch of the Heath Bar. This is a flavor I'll definitely make again!

Oatmeal Stout and Heath Bar Ice Cream (via Craft)

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Tyler Cowen argues for autism as part of a "neurodiverse" world that has many kinds of normal, noting that "diagnosed autistics are very often those people who encounter major problems in life," while those for whom autism provides an advantage are rarely diagnosed.

Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics...

A partial list notes that autistics have, on average, superior pitch perception and other musical abilities, they are better at noticing details in patterns, they have better visual acuity, they are less likely to be fooled by optical illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, they solve many puzzles at a much faster rate, and they are less likely to have false memories of particular kinds. Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive tasks. The savants, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional skills or savantlike abilities...

It turns out that the American university is an environment especially conducive to autistics. Many autistics are disadvantaged or overwhelmed by processing particular stimuli from the outside world and thus are subject to perceptual overload as a result. For some autistics, that is debilitating, but for many others it is either manageable or a problem they can work around. The result is that many autistics prefer stable environments, the ability to choose their own hours and work at home, and the ability to work on focused projects for long periods of time.

Autism as Academic Paradigm (via Kottke)

bheer writes "Google's Open-Source Chromium project announced a new compression technique called Courgette geared towards distributing really small updates today. Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example) than standard binary-diffing algorithms like bsdiff by disassembling the code and sending the assembler diffs over the wire. This, the Chromium devs say, will allow them to send smaller, more frequent updates, making users more secure. Since this will be released as open source, it should make distributing updates a lot easier for the open-source community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really like the inexpensive gimbal support developed by William over at YB2nornal for his $15 steadicam project. I may bogart it for a forthcoming Make: Project. Via Hack a day.

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

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To honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA has just released these brand new restored videos of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic first steps on the moon. The space agency is working with Lowry Digital in Burbank to restore tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk &mdash the project in its entirety will be completed in the fall, but they're offering a sneak peek at some of the iconic moments, like Neil Armstrong (above) and Buzz Aldrin (below) taking their first steps on the moon, starting right now. These clips show side-by-side comparisons of the footage stored in the NASA archives vs. the never-seen-before newly restored footage. Stay tuned for more reporting about the "lost" Apollo 11 tapes and an interview with Buzz Aldrin on BBG on Monday. Below, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin raising the American flag on the moon's surface: Footage courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

I visited the home of BB pals Richard "Dangerous Minds" Metzger and Tara McGinley last week, and Richard showed me this gem, found on a telephone pole nearby. "I'm still peeing myself laughing about this guy," says Richard.

MAN CLAIMS TO LOOK LIKE MICHAEL FROM "GOOD TIMES" (Dangerous Minds)

Update: A savvy BB commenter points out that the guy's a) prolific b) known.

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

Boing Boing Video proudly presents this newly rediscovered gem: The Texas Strip, a 1944 "Soundie" which inspired the Devo song and video "Whip It." Watch as a singing cowboy flirts with cowgirls sitting on a a fence, then strips one of them with his whip (oh my).

The WWII-era down-home striptease comes to us as a special courtesy of Oddball Film + Video, a San Francisco stock footage company that maintains a truly amazing and extensive archive of weird old moving images. They do regular screenings in San Francisco.

---

Where to Find Boing Boing Video: boingboingvideo.com. RSS feed for new episodes here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to Robert Chehoski and Stephen Parr of Oddball Film + Video)

Nikon has released a service advisory for its D5000 DSLR. It addresses power issues with a specific batch of D5000's. Affected cameras can be identified by their serial numbers, which will apparently be added to Nikon's website next week. These cameras will be repaired for free by contacting the company's customer support center.

With the silly introduction last week of the AP's attempt to create a weird and totally unnecessary new data feed to keep out aggregators and search engines, it seems that Google has gotten fed up. Google execs and employees have made similar statements on various panels and discussions, but Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen put up a blog post directed at newspapers, that can be summarized as: Dear newspapers: let me introduce you to a tool that's been around forever. It's called robots.txt. If you don't like us indexing you, use it. Otherwise, shut up. In only slightly nicer language.

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proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme. What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kurt Anderson, the co-founder of Spy (one of my favorite magazines ever) and the host of the smart public radio program Studio 360, has written a pithy, inspired, and inspiring book called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America.

In 96 pages, Anderson describes the United States' previous boom and bust cycles and explains why the bust cycles are essential for innovation and improvement of living standards for everyone. Times of crisis, he says, open new opportunities for making positive changes.

Excerpts:

From the beginning of the 1980s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent paying off its mortgage and consumer debt increased by 35 percent. Back in 1982, the average American household saved 11 percent of its disposable income, but then the percentage steadily dropped, to less than 1 percent in 2007. 

Not coincidentally, it was during this same period that state-sanctioned and state-run gambling became ubiquitous in America. Until the late 1980s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now twelve states do, and forty-eight of the fifty have some form of legalized betting. It's as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun we ought to make them year-round ways of life. We started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new American house increased by half, even as the average family became smaller. During the two decades ending 2007, the average new American car got 29 percent heavier, 89 percent more powerful, and 2 percent less efficient. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least twenty pounds heavier than someone of the same age during the 1970s. Back in the late 1970s, 15 percent of Americans were obese; more than a third of us are now. 

...

It's as if the Roaring Twenties, instead of crashing to a halt in 1929, had lasted all the way until 1945, uninterrupted by a depression or world war. Despite the recession of 1990 . . . and the popped bubble in technology stocks in 2000 . . . and then another recession . . . and the terrorist attacks in 2001 . . . despite all of it, the 1980s spirit endured, like an awesome winning streak in Las Vegas or a multigenerational rave that went on and on and on. The Soviet Union collapsed: yes! American-style capitalism triumphed and spread: hooray! So what if every year since the turn of the twenty- first century the U.S. economy was growing much more slowly than the global economy? The (Chinese-made) stuff we were all buying at Walmart and Costco and H&M stayed supercheap-as did money itself, which our new best friends, the Chinese, obligingly supplied to us by the low-interest-rate trillion. The fresh technological miracles and wonders just kept on coming, reinforcing our sense that progress was on the march and magic was in the air. Even 9/11 and our resulting Iraqi debacle, after a while, came to seem like mere bumps in the road. 

Deep down we had an inkling at least that the spiral of over- leverage and overspending and the prices of stocks and houses bubbling ever higher were unsustainable, just as everyone figured that the unprecedented performances of baseball players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens couldn't be kosher, but . . . no one wanted to be a buzz kill. From 1982 until 2008, we partied like it was 1999. 

Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

Heat pipes, I am obliged to point out, are awesome. When somebody first explained to me how they work, I was like, "No way. Uh-unh. Don't believe you." And yet they persist in existing, and working, in spite of my disbelief. I'm still getting over the pain.

Lots of people sell heat pipes to overclockers/PC performance hackers for processor cooling. But I've often wondered about other applications--dark, brooding, evil applications for which there may not be suitably diabolical commercial units. Hence I'm curious about rolling my own, and hence I'm very appreciative of Jim over at Benchtest.Com, who has built several of his own pipes, and done a great job documenting the process and the performance of the resulting devices.

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eyrieowl writes "J.R.R.'s heirs are suing for royalties on the LoTR films. Apparently they haven't gotten any money due to some creative accounting. Peter Jackson ought to understand...he had to sue the studio for much the same reason. As for The Hobbit? FTFA: 'Tolkien's family and a British charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, seek more than $220 million in compensation...[and]...the option to terminate further rights to the author's work.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kyle sez "An unidentified blob is making its way through the Arctic ocean, engulfing wildlife (only feathers and bones were left of a goose that was caught in it), and no one knows what it is."

Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.

"It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.

"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism..."

"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.

"It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.

Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities (Thanks, Kyle!)

Here's a set of intriguing notes by Joey DeVilla from a talk at the FutureRuby conference called "Artisanal Retro-Futurism and Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism," presented by Brian Marick. I hope a video goes up soon -- I'd love to hear this in full.

# First, let's consider what "anarcho-syndicalism" is
# Consider an agile team. The see themselves as alone in a dangerous place, where no one else is offering any help.

   * It would be nice if a "daddy" swooped in and help save them from the mean people
   * The are problems with this approach: it's pathetic, and it often doesn't work

# Here's a story for you to illustrate things:

   * An agile team was made to work in cubicles, like the rest of the company
   * Agile methods aside, cubicles are the "single worst arrangement of humans and objects in space for the purpose of developing software"
   * The team proposed changing their workspace to an open one
   * Furniture Police turned them down
   * In response, the scrum-master went to the office over the weekend. She disassembled the cubicles and changed the office layout to an open one. On Monday, she declared to the Furniture Police that "If the cubicles come back, you will have to fire me."
   * They gave in

FutureRuby Talk: "Artisanal Retro-Futurism and Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism"

Update: Here's that video