In this BBC piece, an Intel engineer on the Isle of Wight, shows off the 16th century thatched cottage that he's wired with sensors and connected to Twitter. In the article that accompanies the video, he uses a term he's apparently coined for objects that tweet: "tweetjects."

I'm here to try and stage a lexicographical intervention. As the editor of Wired's Jargon Watch column for 12 years and as a computer and Internet terms consultant for the Oxford American Dictionary, I'm asking, no I'm begging, please don't call 'em "tweetjects!" "Blobjects" was bad enough, but at least it made a kind of ham-handed sense. Then we had "blogjects." I'm still trying to work that one out of my mouth. Now tweetjects? Sounds like a breakfast cereal that's too good to taste any good. The brilliant American lexicographer (and CRAFT magazine contributor) Erin McKean says we vote with our usage. Please people, vote "No" on this tortured Manglish.

The Tweeting House: Twitter + Internet of Things

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With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we've asked some of the participants involved to provide some guest posts, including their thoughts on the experiment itself. Martin Thörnkvist runs the Swedish Record label Songs I Wish I Had Written, who represents Moto Boy, one of the artists involved in our Techdirt Music Club. If you order both the Techdirt Music Club and the Techdirt Book Club before midnight PT, August 3rd, we'll throw in a free Techdirt hoodie, or a free lunch with Mike Masnick. We asked Martin to write about his experiences with the "new" music world and new music business models:

In 1999 I attended a Ron Sexsmith concert. As always, he did a great performance. He did an amazing cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye." The way he introduced made me even more exited: as he played the intro, Ron said, "this is a song I wish I had written." That's admiration of somebody else's art.

Some years before, I had tried to learn play the guitar. I remember one summer in particular I spent way too many hours trying to learn Yellow Submarine. Damn, was I bad. Instead of tearing my hair out while playing guitar, I decided to channel my love for music in another way: I started a web-based fanzine. This was four years before MySpace, and to make it possible for our readers to listen to the obscure indie pop acts (artists like Peter Bjorn and John, Jose Gonzales and Jens Lekman) we wrote about, we started a special webshop for music. Some years later, we got tired of the fanzine, but after some months I missed the webshop bit and started it up again. After a few months, I asked a new band called Eurosport if I could sell their CDs -- to which they let me know they didn't have any! Still, I loved their songs and asked them if they wanted me to print a cover and burn some CDRs, and they agreed. After receiving a threat of being sued, the band changed their name to Le Sport, and the first song they had ever written (and I ever released) turned out to be a summer hit in Sweden. I went with the flow and tried to learn how the music business work. Suddenly, I had a record label. Wihoo.

The name of the label was of course: Songs I Wish I Had Written. The statement I wrote then still pins it down quite well, I think:

"We see this label as a frame that puts pieces of art in the focal point. It's the art itself that is important; the frame exists as a context which further emphasizes the brilliance of the chosen creations."

Now, as you can imagine: a guy with no experience and no money had to rely on something other than the traditional ways of doing things. Luckily for me, some years before the label was founded, the internet had become popular -- with music fueling much of its progress.

"Hey, what a perfect match," I thought. My main goal is to spread the music I love, and here's the most powerful copying machine the world has ever seen at my desktop, free to use. The main reason for the instant success of Le Sport (apart from the great songs) was our way of using free music as a way to market the music. We were sure that the more listeners we got, the more buyers we would get.

I've never really felt any need to think about my role in relation to the artist I work with. I have always gone with the flow. But lately, after a variety of in-depth discussions on the future of the music business, I've started to think more of my specific role in all of this. I think there is a need for a discussion on the role of middlemen in the music industry. I think that's because, to me, it's crucial to make correct (or at least good) decisions on future possibilities and strategies.

In the work of positioning what you offer to your costumers, I think you get a good picture of what contemporary reality looks like. You learn from both the good and bad examples that others are executing in music industry (and other digital content industries). So how could I position myself, where it would be obvious which powerful tools can be used in an inventive way in order to be the best in the world to offer what I need to offer?

The two most important cornerstones I defined for my future work are:

1. to make the music I work with available in as many ways my customers want to listen to it and
2. help the artist I work with with creative ideas to engage with those listeners.

I would like to coin a new term for the type of modern music professional I see myself as being. I'm hereby dubbing myself as a CA - Creative Administrator.

To explain the admin bit: Most artists I know aren't even able to keep a calendar! That's ok, but they surely need help. And so do their fans, who all are wandering around in an all you can eat Mecca. Musicians need an admin and fans require reasons to buy. I need to be creative and always keep an eye (if you have been in the biz longer than me you'll probably need to keep two -- and it probably helps to talk to your kids every day to keep track of what they're doing) on the reality of what I can and should offer my customers, artists and fans: something they can't get elsewhere.

Now, download "A Room Without You" by Moto Boy for free (and enjoy it!) and check out the Techdirt Music Club which features that song as a musical box (creative! right?)

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In response to our post of the "BuckyBalls" magnetic beads, Mister Zed pointed us to this cool Bill Beaty demo of super magnetic beads and the behavior of their magnetic fields in loops and chains. Bill also shows how you can make a simple compass with the magnets. Lots of other cool info and vids about magnets on this page.

Super magnet Bead Tricks

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dustpan writes "The BBC has a story up about a quartet of robotic fire fighters that the London Fire Brigade is testing and with which have been achieving 'tremendous results.' The robots were developed by QinetiQ, which is a defense contractor. The LFB has been testing the units since last year and the machines are primarily used in fires involving acetylene canisters. The group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the LFB says that the robots have cut the time to resolve these potential hazards from 24 hours to 3. From the article: 'Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week. Now it doesn't even make the news.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While there's lots of attention being paid to the fact that some team has won the Netflix Prize (it probably won't be announced who until September), there's an interesting side story that's worth noting -- which is how important collaboration was in breaking through. Plenty of studies have shown that innovation happens much faster when you have the free and open sharing of information (rather than having it locked up, say, by patents), as that mixture of different approaches and ideas allows for breakthroughs to come much faster (in fact, studies have shown that much of the success in Silicon Valley came from the free sharing of info across companies as people rapidly moved around).

And, in fact, that's exactly what happened with the Netflix Prize. The first "team" to break the 10% finish line, BellKor, was actually a merger of a few separate teams, allowing them to combine different pieces of different approaches to actually leap ahead. So, rather than trying to hoard the idea for themselves to claim the entire prize themselves, they realized it was better to team up to make the real breakthrough.

But, then a second interesting thing happened. Since the rules allowed another 30 days for other teams to offer up solutions that beat the first one, a bunch of other teams realized that it was in their best interest to team up as well, in order to leap-frog the original team. So they created the aptly named Ensemble -- and, again, the merger of various teams and different approaches allowed them to jump forward. It's not clear who actually had the best solution (both teams claim they did), but it's nice to see yet another clear example of the value of collaboration in innovation, against the standard myth of the lone inventor having a "flash of genius." It's also interesting to see the game theory aspect of the "loser teams" recognizing that they had to team up in order to catch up with the leader in the space.

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Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times has the story of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of botnets. Sandia scientist Ron Minnich, the inventor of LinuxBIOS, and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers. The researchers say they hope to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet and then gather data on how the system behaves. 'When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyber-attack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,' says Minnich. 'It's an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.' The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. MegaTux is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun updates us on the Netflix Prize now that the competition has officially closed. We discussed the new leader with one day to go in the contest: The Ensemble, taking the lead from long-time leader BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first contestant to submit an entry that broke the 10% barrier. In the contest's final day, BellKor re-took the lead with 20 minutes to go, then The Ensemble apparently pulled a Michael Phelps with 4 minutes to go, squeaking ahead by 0.01%. At least so the leaderboard claims — but those numbers are posted by the competing teams. The NY Times reports that an official winner will not be named until September — Netflix needs that much time to pore through the complex entries and read the code. Netflix contacted BellKor on Sunday to tell them the team remained in first place; The Ensemble has had no such notification.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom writes in to alert us that a woman in Chicago has been sued for defamation by the company that manages her apartment over a Twitter message. The message she put on Twitter read:

"Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay."

And, rather than address a concern of one of their residents, the company brought out the lawyers, and sued for over $50,000. A little investigation reveals that the woman had all of 20 followers, which makes you question just how much actual damage was done by this message.

Still, for my money, the best single paragraph/statement about Horizon Group Management has to be the following one, in the Chicago Sun-Times, quoting Jeffrey Michael, speaking for Horizon Group (and a member of the family that runs it):

"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization," he said, noting that the company manages 1,500 apartments in Chicago and has a good reputation it wants to preserve.

I'm curious as to how being a "sue first, ask questions later kind of organization" meshes with having "a good reputation it wants to preserve." I'd argue that (1) suing a tenant of a meaningless tweet (and drawing much more attention to the complaint) and (2) claiming that you're a "sue first, ask questions later kind of organization" in the national media are going to do a hell of a lot more damage to any "good reputation" (if it existed in the first place) than some random woman with 20 followers bitching about mold in her apartment.

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molnarcs writes "Apple pulls Google Voice-enabled applications from its App Store, citing duplication of functionality. The move affects both Google's official Google Voice and third party apps like Voice Central. Sean Kovacs, main developer of GV Mobile, says that he had personal approval for his app from Phil Shiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, last April. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid suspects AT&T behind the move."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While it doesn't have anything to do with actual buckyballs, this set of 216 rare earth magnetic balls looks like a lot of fun. I just wish they didn't cost $31 (with shipping).

BuckyBalls [via Laughing Squid]

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Phenomenal figure painter Korin Faught turned me on to the work of her pal Savanna Snow, a terrific Berkeley-based artist who has a solo show opening this Friday, July 31, in Los Angeles. The exhibition titled "Charming Cobras," is at the Reform School store/gallery. According to Snow, this lovely collection is "an exploration of Vedic text, pattern & the infinity of India. Savanna Snow's Charming Cobras (Thanks, Korin Faught!)

krou writes "The Washington Post has a look at the rise of the digital nomad, workers who have shunned the idea of working in an office, or working from home. Instead, they've taken the next logical step in the evolution of teleworking, and work wherever there is a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, using tools such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter, to gain both primitive ('If I'm working at home by myself, I am really hating life. I need people.') and practical ('There is no hope for the road system around here.') benefits from this nomadic lifestyle. The need for contact with other people has driven some nomads to start working with others in public places and at strangers' homes. Other benefits from nomadic working include changing the scenery, and starting the work day 'long after many of their colleagues out at the cubicle farm have spent hours preparing for and getting to their workstations.' Coffee shop owners love the trend, and so do some employers, one of whom (an AOL manager), says: 'It's a win-win' because the employee in question 'is happy doing what he loves and from a business perspective, we gain valuable industry knowledge, contacts, and insights.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I think some folks in India may have multiple complaints with the government. That's because it's been revealed that the service that handles online complaints for the gov't just happens to be revealing all the private data of people who complain, including their passwords in plaintext. Apparently, when you looked at your own profile, you could see all of your own data (plus password) and then as you hit refresh you'd see others -- which you could edit if you wanted to. Not exactly a particularly secure system...

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The twice-monthly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17

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This week, we take a peek at the not-lost but fast-fading art of wire-wrapping. Wire-wrapping used to be a circuit prototyping and assembly technique found in the repertoire of every electronics geek, but increasingly, generations of wireheads are now coming of age knowing little-to-nothing about it. I, for one, have never operated a wrap tool or populated a wrap card in my life. I got a wire wrap tool in an electronics toolkit at the beginning of my interest in electronics and hadn't the vaguest idea what it was until, years later, I saw it in a how-to book and thought: "Aha, so THAT'S what that funny-looking tool is for!"

Wikipedia has a good overview of wire-wrapping:

The electronic parts sometimes plug into sockets. The sockets are attached with cyanoacrylate (or silicone adhesive) to thin plates of glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy.

The sockets have square posts. The usual posts are 0.025 inches (635 micrometres) square, 1 inch (25.4 mm) high, and spaced at 0.1 inch (2.54 mm) intervals. Premium posts are hard-drawn beryllium-copper alloy plated with a 0.000025 inches (25 microinches) (635 nanometres) of gold to prevent corrosion. Less-expensive posts are bronze with tin plating.

30 gauge silver-plated soft copper wire is insulated with a fluorocarbon that does not emit dangerous gases when heated. The most common insulation is "kynar".

The 30 AWG Kynar is cut into standard lengths, then one inch of insulation is removed on each end.

A "wire wrap tool" has two holes. The wire and one quarter inch (6.35 mm) of insulated wire are placed in a hole near the edge of the tool. The hole in the center of the tool is placed over the post.

The tool is rapidly twisted. The result is that 1.5 to 2 turns of insulated wire are wrapped around the post, and atop that, 7 to 9 turns of bare wire are wrapped around the post. The post has room for three such connections, although usually only one or two are needed. This permits manual wire-wrapping to be used for repairs.

The turn and a half of insulated wire helps prevent wire fatigue where it meets the post.

Above the turn of insulated wire, the bare wire wraps around the post. The corners of the post bite in with pressures of tons per square inch (MPa). This forces all the gases out of the area between the wire's silver plate and the post's gold or tin corners. Further, with 28 such connections (seven turns on a four-cornered post), a very reliable connection exists between the wire and the post. Furthermore, the corners of the posts are quite "sharp".

The backplane of a Zilog Z80 computer from 1977. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

SydShamino writes "Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that the dye used in blue M&Ms and other foods can, when given intravenously to a lab rat shortly after a spinal injury, minimize secondary damage caused by the body when it kills off nearby healthy cells. The dye is called BBG or Brilliant Blue G. Given that 85% of spinal injury patients are currently untreated (and some doctors don't trust the treatment given to the other 15%), a relatively safe treatment like this could help preserve some function for thousands of patients. The best part is that in lab rats the subjects given the treatment turn blue." The researchers are "pulling together an application to be lodged with the FDA to stage the first clinical trials of BBG on human patients."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Graham has an interesting essay about the differences between a "maker's schedule" and a "manager's schedule" and how meetings affect makers' productivity.

Excerpts:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

* * *

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

I've trained myself to make use of punctuated nuggets of time, but I do cherish appointment-free days.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (Thanks, Daniel!)

h+ Magazine has a fascinating interview with Dr. Ronald Arkin, the director of Georgia Tech's Mobile Robot Lab who literally wrote the book on the ethics of robots that kill. The book, titled Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, lays out Arkin's research across law, philosophy, military ethics, and engineering to address dilemmas we'll face in the future as we build even more complex killing machines. From h+:

h+: How does the process of introducing moral robots onto the battlefield get bootstrapped and field tested to avoid serious and potentially lethal "glitches" in the initial versions of the ethical governor? What safeguards should be in place to prevent accidental war?

RA: Verification and validation of software and systems is an integral part of any new battlefield system. It certainly must be adhered to for moral robots as well. What exactly the metrics are and how they can be measured for ethical interactions during the course of battle is no doubt challenging, but one I feel can be met if properly studied. It likely would involve the military's battle labs, field experiments, and force-on-force exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of the ethical constraints on these systems prior to their deployment, which is fairly standard practice. The goal is not to erode mission effectiveness, while reducing collateral damage.

A harder problem is managing the changes and tactics that an intelligent adaptive enemy would use in response to the development of these systems... to avoid spoofing and ruses that could take advantage of these ethical restraints in a range of situations. This can be minimized, I believe, by the use of bounded morality –- limiting their deployment to narrow, tightly prescribed situations, and not for the full spectrum of combat.

"Teaching Robots the Rules of War" (h+, thanks RU Sirius!)

Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Amazon)

With the AP being out there claiming that fair use only covers snippets fewer than five words, there are some questions about where the boundaries for "fair use" of "snippets" lies. Unfortunately, a new ruling in Europe seems to be pretty extreme (in a bad way). The ruling found that a snippet as short as eleven words could be copyright infringement. The case involved a clipping service, that would scan in articles (from print publications) and then would give clients very short snippets that highlighted the keywords they were monitoring. In many ways, this sounds like the physical equivalent of any online search engine. The clipping company claimed that it was legal because it was "transient," but the court said that since the service printed the output on paper, it was "permanent." Yikes.

While the online world is a little different, it's not too difficult to see how someone could make a case that a search engine is doing the identical thing to what the clipping company was doing here, and the question of whether or not the result is "transient" or "permanent" is entirely dependent on the end-user -- which was part of why the court found paper to be permanent:

"Since the data capture process is apparently not likely itself to destroy that medium, the deletion of that reproduction is entirely dependent on the will of the user of that process. It is not at all certain that he will want to dispose of the reproduction, which means that there is a risk that the reproduction will remain in existence for a longer period, according to the user's needs,"

Certainly, you could say the same thing about a search engine result (the end-user could certainly store them -- or [gasp!] print them), and then you've got the same problem. No matter how you look at it, this is a bad ruling. It makes little sense from the perspective of publishers, clipping services, users or the entire online world.

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Along with Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, the early 1980s television show That's Incredible! had a big influence on me, with its coverage of an eclectic mix of curiosities, oddities, strange phenomena, stunts, and unusual people. Over at Dangerous Minds, Tara spotted this great moment from the "That's Incredible! Video Game Invitational." Tara says, "They're so serious!" Damn straight. "'That’s Incredible' Broadcasts History’s First Video Game World Championship (1983)"

gbulmash sends in a classic Streisand Effect story of a Chicago landlord suing a tenant over a tweet complaining of mold in her apartment. The landlord claims that the tweet caused $50,000 damage to their reputation. If it didn't, then the fallout from their own ill-advised lawsuit surely will. The woman's Twitter account is now gone (possibly on advice of counsel), but the tweet that started it all lives on. And in a similar vein, reader levicivita notes a firing over a political comment on a Facebook page. "Lee Landor, who had been the deputy press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer since May, posted comments on her Facebook page criticizing Mr. Gates [Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.] and the president, whom she referred to at one point as 'O-dumb-a.' ... The borough president has accepted Ms. Landor's resignation, effective immediately."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Funny video of congresspeople running away from a Huffington Post reporter because they don't want to answer the question, "Is Barack Obama is an American?" If they say yes, they will offend their birther wingnut base. If they say no, they will be seen as birther winguts. So, they run.

Only one, Trent Franks of Arizona, gives a correct and clear answer, but even he can't help himself from suggesting that Obama is facilitating Jihad and turning America into a socialist state.

Folks, this is what it has come to. The most powerful people in the world -- nationally elected legislators responsible for setting policy for the most powerful country on earth -- are lining up with cuckoo-bat-shit-crazy elements of the lunatic fringe.

And they have to. It's their base.

Elected Birthers on the Hill

Last night, dozens of witnesses reported seeing lights and hearing an explosion as something crashed into the Ottawa River. Search-and-rescue crews from Ottawa and Gatineau showed up but so far, haven't found anything. Was it an airplane? According to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, no planes are missing. Maybe it was a meteorite? Or.. something else? (I'm kidding. Kinda.) From the Ottawa Citizen:

Dr. Dirk Keenan was sailing with some friends out of the Nepean Yacht Club when they saw the light of what looked like a small aircraft to the east, close to the Quebec shore.

“I noticed the light coming down. It was like a headlight, very bright,” Keenan said Tuesday morning. “It descended very rapidly, levelled off, then disappeared.”

Keenan, a student pilot himself, thought it looked like the pilot had lost control and gone into a dive, then briefly recovered before going down. Keenan steered his boat toward the position, but didn’t dare get too close to the rapids in the dark. The lights appeared to vanish into the river or into the forest on the Quebec side.

"Search resumes for small plane feared crashed in river"

Mick Jones has opened a "library" of Clash ephemera and is encouraging visitors to scan the stickers, fliers, and other archival material in the library and copy them to memory sticks.

The Rock n Roll Public Library is Mick Jones’s (The Clash, B.A.D, Carbon Silicon) direct artistic challenge to the likes of the corporate 02 British Music Experience. Rather than let his creative legacy atrophy Jones is transforming his own archive of nearly 10,000 artefacts into one unique "guerrilla-library." Set under the Westway motorway in 3000 sq.ft of former office space, Jones’s five-week civic endeavour will also encourage visitors to enrol, interact with the archive-exhibition (Jones began collecting well before he formed The Clash in 1976 to eventual international success, as such it forms an invaluable guide to the influences that informed Jones as a pop-artist). Also uniquely by request users will be able to scan (courtesy Genus, U.K distributor of the Book2net Kiosk) certain objects and via memory stick carry them away. Please note visitors to the world’s first, resolutely alternative, Rock n Roll Public Library shouldn’t expect peace and quiet.

Mick Jones of the Clash opens library (Via Arbroath)

Jerry Lowery, 38, of Illinois was charged with stealing more than 500 pairs of eyeglasses from suburban spectacle shops. Apparently he has a fetish. rom the Associated Press:

Prosecutors said Lowery walked into three shops between April and July and said he had a gun. They say he took more than 500 pairs of high-end glasses including Prada and Gucci brands, but didn't take cash.

The criminal complaint quotes Lowery as saying he "really likes to be around glasses." He told investigators he tries them on in front of a mirror and then discards them.

"Man with fetish charged with stealing eyeglasses"

Professor_Quail writes with this interesting excerpt: "Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world's most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminum' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If lemonie's Lego microtome is too involved for you, here's a way simpler design for a simple hand microtome made from a wooden spool, a bolt, a nut, a washer, and a bit of dowel rod, plus the essential razor blade.

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Timeless advice from a World War II era poster.

Back in June, we noted a curious addition to a rather typical patent troll-type lawsuit filed in East Texas. Along with a bunch of big name companies (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, etc.) were two "unknown" or at least little known companies that happened to be based in East Texas. The reasoning seemed pretty obvious. Courts have been given a bit more leeway in transferring patent lawsuits lately, after years of attempts by patent hoarders to have them all in East Texas (notoriously friendly to patent holders). So, what better way to insist that East Texas is a good place for the lawsuit than to include some East Texas companies (any ones will do!)? Except, it appears that the lawyers for the patent holder (McKool Smith -- a favorite among the patent hoarders) didn't do much research on at least one of those "companies," named CitiWare. Slashdot alerts us to the fact that CitiWare was basically just a small open source project from one guy, who hoped to turn it into a business, but couldn't find any customers and shut it down. That guy has now turned the CitiWare.com website into an angry open letter to the patent holder and to its lawyers, demanding that they drop the case against him. Next time, perhaps those busy lawyers in East Texas will actually take the time to figure out if the companies they're suing exist, let alone infringed on whatever bogus patent they're representing.

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What's not to love about childhood video game nostalgia and cutting-edge CG on the big screen again? Also, this from Wikipedia, regarding some crafty marketing for the upcoming film: "On July 21, 2009, several movie-related websites posted they had received via mail a pair of 'Flynn's Arcade' golden coins along with a flash drive. Its content was an animated gif image that showed css code lines. Four of them were put together and part of the code was cracked, revealing the url to Flynnlives.com, a fiction site mantained by activists who believe Kevin Flynn is alive, even though he's been missing since 1989." #

A handy tool from Ryan Berg that "... was created to quickly display the colors used in any CSS file, with basic color find/replace editing functionality". #

Jon Hicks' @media presentation in PDF form. Even without the commentary, there's some wonderfully great information here. #

eldavojohn writes "Certainly one of the most important steps in adopting a protocol is a working open source example of it. Well, google has open sourced an implementation of the wave protocol for those of you curious about Google's new collaboration and conversation platform. It's been reviewed, skewered and called 'Anti-Web' but now's your chance to see a Java implementation of it. The article lists it as still rapidly evolving so it might not be prudent to buy into it yet. Any thumbs up or thumbs down from actual users of the new protocol?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A microtome is a laboratory machine normally used to slice extremely thin samples of soft specimens for optical microscopy. If you're one of those folks who could care less about optical microscopy, it also has culinary applications. I quote from the sacred text of GoodFellas:

In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, then we had a meat or a fish. Paulie was doing a year for contempt and had a wonderful system for garlic. He used a razor and sliced it so thin it would liquefy in the pan with a little oil. It's a very good system.

Poor Paulie had to do it by hand, but of course he lots of time on his hands. Those of us who are busier might consider this tutorial by Instructables user lemonie, who built a hand-crank microtome capable of spitting out a 250-micron slice of garlic every second or so, out of Lego elements and a razor blade.

More:

• Lego combination safe
• The Lego sequencer
• Lego NXT 3D scanner

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

As a kid, I remember that a suspicious number of my toy robots seemed to originate from Tomy, which I always pictured as a sophisticated Japanese concern, headquartered in a gleaming steel building on, probably, a hovering island off the coast of Hokkaido.

I thought this because, unlike most toy companies, Tomy seemed to secretly long to be a real robot company. Sure, they had the usual little wind-up and remote control robots (and the less usual, like the owl-bot pictured here), but they kept sneaking into their line more and more sophisticated ones. This site gives a great rundown of the whole 70s-90s era Tomy Robot Army, so you can know just who your cute new plastic master is.

Besides being darn cute, ogutti's iPhone-headed Robochan features the following abilities -

change its face

dance with playing music

wake up alarm with body motion

interaction with its body

teach and playback

- and let's not forget the above-seen leek shaking prowess! (ok, I guess that counts as dancing) [via Pink Tentacle]

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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

One of my other favorite films from the Illegal Art Exhibit was Phil Patiris' "Iraq Campaign 1991," a genius bit of agitprop he created in 1992 using TV footage of the first Gulf War. It was especially a hit at lefty media conferences. I wanted to put this up on the Illegal Art site back in the day, so I'm psyched to see that it has finally made its way online. Enjoy.

Link

(Thanks to Craig B. back in the day)

Arguendo writes "A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Blackboard Inc.'s patent on a learning management system is invalid in light of the inventors' own prior software product. We have previously discussed the patent and Blackboard's trial court victory against Desire2Learn. It's not completely over, but this is almost certainly the death knell for Blackboard's patent. If so inclined, you may read the appellate court's decision here (PDF) or on scribd."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember the story recently about how Bozeman, Montana was asking all applicants for city jobs to hand over their social networking passwords so city officials could log into their accounts? After some widespread complaints, the city smartly backed down, but apparently they're not the only ones demanding passwords. CitMediaLaw points us to a lawsuit filed in Mississippi, concerning a high school student who turned over her Facebook password at the demand of a teacher at the school. The teacher proceeded to log into her account, read her private messages and then send them around to others at the school, causing a lot of problems for the girl.

Apparently, the teacher had originally demanded usernames and passwords to Facebook from a bunch of students to see if they were doing anything illegal (drugs, drinking, etc.), which is already pretty questionable from a privacy standpoint (and violates Facebooks' terms of service). But to then use the contents of private communication to publicly humiliate the girl and punish her for her private messages seems to go way beyond what is both right and legal. Other students at the school had quickly deleted their Facebook profiles when the teacher demanded their passwords, but this girl chose not to, but certainly never expected what followed. It's amazing that any teacher would think that they have a right to demand access to private social networking accounts and then to make use of the content of private messages in that manner.

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The Maker Shed is having a huge summer clearance sale featuring a wide range of products. The sale will run for the rest of the summer, but only while supplies last. Be sure to check back regularly since we will be adding daily specials throughout the summer on some of our popular products.

More about the Maker Shed summer clearance sale

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Recently on Offworld, it was a day of tributes: fans of cult hit RPG series Earthbound celebrated its 20th anniversary, home-crafters celebrated Hand Circus's iPhone platformer Rolando 2, and renowned papercrafter master Matt Hawkins celebrated the pursuits of Pac-Man for an upcoming gallery show. We also saw the first concept art of Minotaur China Shop creators Flashbang's next web-game, Time Donkey, in which players will cooperate with earlier iterations of themselves playing the game to reach their goal, and the first multiplayer video of Infinity Ward's upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, specifically the ability for players to take control of gunships to wreak distant havoc on the battlefield. Finally we saw Media Molecule and Marvel partner to bring comic book heroes to LittleBigPlanet (with cutely taped-on accessories, as above), a new game from Gish co-creator Edmund McMillen that cryptically promises to be "a 1+1=2 formula that will ask more from you after you leave it alone", and, best of all, new pixel art concepts of an imagined Salvador Dali Game Boy Advance game.

Earlier this year, Boing Boing Video ran an interview I conducted with Academy Award-winning special effects designer John Gaeta (Matrix, Speed Racer) about the technology and the human talent behind the forthcoming movie Ninja Assassin, directed by James McTeigue. Gaeta served as visual consultant on the film. The trailer for Ninja Assassin is out now, and it's pretty great. (thanks, Wes Varghese!)

Randy Sarafan at Instructables writes:

Not too long ago, the beloved Instructables kickball was popped by an overzealous dog. As we are not prone to ever throw anything away (ever), it just lamely drifted around the office as people slowly kicked it about in dissatisfaction from spot to spot. This continued for a while until one day I had the idea to resurrect this ball by cutting it in half and turn it into a hanging plant basket. And, that is precisely what I did. Follows are directions so you can do the same.

Take a look at his instructions for a hanging kickball planter.

More:

How-To: Plant hangers from ball chain

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CWmike writes "More than 9 out of every 10 Windows users are vulnerable to the Flash zero-day vulnerability that Adobe won't patch until Thursday, Danish security company Secunia says. According to Secunia, 92% of the 900,000 users who have recently run the company's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) utility have Flash Player 10 on their PCs, while 31% have Flash Player 9. (The total exceeds 100% because some users have installed both.) The most-current versions of Flash Player — 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87) — are vulnerable to hackers conducting drive-by attacks hosted on malicious and legitimate-but-compromised sites. Antivirus vendors have reported hundreds, in some cases thousands, of sites launching drive-bys against Flash."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen, who directed and filmed the documentary "Leaving Fear Behind" (excerpt embedded above) has been charged with "inciting separatism" and is awaiting trial in Siling in eastern Tibet (Chinese: Xining, Qinghai Province). The Chinese government will not allow his lawyers to represent him, so there is not much hope for a fair trial.

Supporters are urging people to take action, by sending a letter to Wu Aiying, China's Minister of Justice and Zhang Yesui, China's Ambassador to the United Nations, demanding Dhondup Wangchen's immediate and unconditional release.

Dhondup Wangchen has been detained since March 2008 and has suffered torture and ill-treatement at the hands of the Chinese authorities. He is being targeted for simply exercising his right to freedom of expression, and the charges against him are part of the Chinese government's widespread campaign to punish and silence Tibetan voices of dissent.

(via Students for a Free Tibet)

From AfriGadget:

Pascal Katana, a Fourth Year student at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, developed an electronic device that 'automates' fishing. The trap employs amplification of the sound made by fish while feeding. The acoustic signals are radiated and attract other fish who head toward the direction of the source thinking there is food there.

Once a good catch is detected by a net weighing mechanism, it triggers a GPRS/GSM device attached to the system and the fisherman gets a call/sms informing him that his catch is ready. Pascal is in the process of developing a by-catch control system which will ensure that his contraption doesn't cause overfishing.

Fish 'call' the Fisherman

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Cymatics.org offers a nice gallery of images and video from their experiments with vibrating fluids. Their test setup using a vacuum-formed speaker inlay + custom lighting rig produces some excellent eye candy. Pics + discussion of their process can be found on the site.

More:

Seeing sound waves

From the pages of MAKE:

Chladni Plate  Volume 16, Page 122

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Franchise reboots are all the rage these days in Hollywood, and the trend is starting to creep into the games industry as well. The Guardian's games blog is running a story discussing a few examples and pondering likely candidates for future reboots. Quoting: "If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating — even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon. Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms." So, which series (or individual title) would you like to see rebooted?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We haven't written that much about the economy lately, as others seem to be doing a great job on it, but back when the TARP program first came about, we were quite concerned with the nature of the program, and specifically the lack of transparency. With the change in administrations -- especially to one that insisted transparency was a key factor, we hoped that things would get better. Now, it's no secret that we've been upset about some of the new administration's failure to live up to its own transparency promises. But there had been some evidence lately that it really was becoming increasingly transparent with how some taxpayer funds are being spent.

Apparently, that doesn't apply to the bailout, though.

Here's a disturbing story about the guy who's in responsible for being the independent watchdog over how the TARP money is being spent. While he's a long-term Democrat and Obama supporter (so his views aren't political), he's been quite critical of how the administration is not being at all transparent concerning how TARP is being used. He wanted the administration to force the banks to explain what they were doing -- and was told that was impossible. So he did it himself -- and asked the banks to let him know how the funds were being used, which they did. He used that and some other info to put out a report, suggesting that the funds aren't being used as was expected. That sounds exactly like what the independent watchdog should be doing.

But the administration (mainly the Treasury Department) has been fighting him, and is now trying to have it declared that the independent watchdog actually is under the control of the Treasury Department -- which would basically take away the whole "independent" part. That seems to go against the very concept of the transparency we were promised. It's great that this guy and his very small team of folks are actually monitoring what's happening with our taxpayer money (whether you agree with how it was used or not). It's not a good sign that the Obama administration is now trying to muzzle him. That's not transparency people can believe in.

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WIRED contributing editor Scott Carney interviewed a Somali pirate for his story in Wired about pirate economics, and Wired.com is running an excerpt of that interview.

What was your job before you start this one or what forced you to become a pirate?

Every government in the world is off our coasts. What is left for us? Nine years ago everyone in this town was stable and earn[ed] enough income from fishing. Now there is nothing. We have no way to make a living. We had to defend ourselves. We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don't call us pirates. We are protectors.

How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for? What makes them negotiate downwards?

Once you have a ship, it's a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

Exclusive Interview: Pirate on When to Negotiate, Kill Hostages (Danger Room)

Merce Cunningham, avant-garde choreographer and pioneer of modern dance died yesterday at age 90. While his own career focused on dance, Cunningham influenced and collaborated with artists as diverse as John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman. For Here is Cunningham on the use of chance operations to create artistic works:

John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams. Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.

Merce Cunningham (New York Times)
Merce Cunningham Dance Company

dusty writes "Remember those green lasers from Star Wars? Turns out that faking green lasers has been easy for years, but making true green laser diodes has been the stuff of science fiction. Until recently, that is. Now researchers from Japan have created the world's first true green laser diode. Until now, only red and blue laser diodes were available, and now with the addition of green, new TVs and projectors that are more efficient can be produced. And if you were wondering how green lasers pointers are already produced, it is a hack that involved doubling the frequency of an infrared laser. The new true green laser diodes have much higher efficiency than the current 6%, leading many to expect big time laser display breakthroughs in the near future. Ars Technica has a well-written article on this breakthrough."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

I found this 1972 Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies ad in a Taschen collection.

Radioactivity. It's been in the family for generations. In fact, scientists can tell us just how old our remote ancestors are by measuring the radioactivity still in the bones of prehistoric cave dwellers.

Was this really reassuring? All of the dead people you've ever heard about are radioactive! Why not: "Radiation: because EVERYTHING causes cancer!"

Here's a great example of what makes the Arduino platform so great. In need of a basic frequency counter on the quick, I dug up some code & schematics based on the ATTiny2313. But just before breaking out my programmer + protoboard, I thought to have a look Arduino.cc in case someone had written similar code for Arduino. Lo and behold - Martin Nawrath's Frequency Counter library was but a few clicks into the site's playground section. I had the setup up and running in no time with the Arduino IDE's serial monitor - and after a few small changes to the code, had it playing nice with a serial display. There's also an ArduinoMega-compatible version of the library's cpp file available here.

More:

How-To: Build a frequency meter

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Mikey Sklar's Dirt Dog battery pack was kaput. He took it apart, found the dead cell in the pack, and replaced it with a NiMH AA rechargeable.

iRobot Dirt Dog Battery

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After Microsoft donated driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2, stories surfaced that they had done so under duress of already being in violation of the GPL. Microsoft quickly denied that any GPL violation was a driver for their decision to donate the code; the company's senior director of platform strategy, Sam Ramji, said at the time: "Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license." Now the Software Freedom Law Center confirms that Microsoft was indeed in violation of the GPLv2 when it distributed its Hyper-V Linux Integration Components without providing source code. Community members led by Greg Kroah-Hartman contacted the company and coached them through the process of getting compliant. Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Each week we're bringing you some of our favorite posts from our friends over at TreeHugger. Enjoy!

Fish are the Secret Sauce for Better LEDs
What happens when you mix fluorescent dyes with salmon DNA? Awesome lighting!

Killer (Veggie) Robots for the Military
It can drive and feed itself, but veggie style. We aren't that ready to go Terminator yet.

Australians + Bikes + Hip-Hop Videos = Hilarity
Would you ditch the car and hop on a fixie after seeing this video?

Ginormous Solar Flowers with Free Wi-Fi Taking Over US Cities
Six lucky cities will get some ridiculous looking solar flowers for a little free wi-fi and rest time. Is your city on the list??

This video is an advertisement for the polymer laser-cut soldering stencils made by LaserCutPCBStencils.com, but it's a pretty good overall introduction to using stencils for quick and easy surface-mount soldering that you can then bake in an oven.

LaserCutPCBStencils

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As we wait to hear if Spotify's mobile app gets approved (I heard a rumor that it was, but have seen no proof yet), we hear of another questionable Apple iPhone rejection: the Google Voice iPhone app has been forbidden from the iPhone, though the reasons aren't entirely clear. Still, it does show that Apple doesn't care who you are, or how big a name. If it doesn't like your app, too bad. Once again, this seems like an argument for why more open solutions will win out in the end. Not only do users not have to worry about arbitrary rejections like this, but innovation will happen much faster on open platforms where each innovation doesn't need to be approved by a mercurial secret cabal.

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Ubisoft recently revealed that their game sales have seen a 50% drop over the past quarter, blaming the overall market slowdown and piracy (particularly on the DS) for the low numbers. They also announced that four of their games, including Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2, would be delayed until 2010. The company's CEO, Yves Guillemot, now says they are working on a new anti-piracy tool that should be ready by the end of 2009. He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

zaphod2 alerts us to a storm brewing in Europe over access by US intelligence agencies to EU banking data. There is considerable opposition in Europe to extending this access. The submitter adds, "I wonder how long it takes until gambling, online games, or non-RIAA-approved music shops are considered supporters of terrorism." "US anti-terror officials want to be able to continue examining Europeans' financial transactions, and it appears likely that the European Union is going to comply. ... The US has been examining transactions handled by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT) since the 9/11 attacks... However, SWIFT, which is located in Belgium, is planning to move its servers and database — which is currently located in the US — to Europe. With data privacy laws far stricter in Europe, the US would then need permission from the EU before it could gain access to this sensitive information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been careful to avoid covering most of the insanity around the Joel Tenenbaum trial from the last few months, as it became increasingly clear that the whole thing was a giant mess -- culminating in the plan to try to defend Joel's file sharing as "fair use." Pretty much everyone told the legal team that such a defense would never fly and it was a huge mistake. It's entirely unclear why Charlie Nesson kept pushing it. It should come as no surprise, then, to find out that the judge has rejected a fair use defense. One can hope that Nesson and crew actually have a better defense ready, but with the judge rejecting the planned fair use defense just hours before the trial began, you have to wonder if "Team Tenenbaum" has a real strategy at all. Hopefully it's just been hidden from all of us, because there are significant legal points that can be attacked, but to date Nesson seems to have focused on long shots, rather than the real legal questions at play.

Not only that, but it appears that even Judge Gertner (who originally approached Nesson about representing Tenenbaum, but had to scold him multiple times and threaten sanctions) seems to recognize that if Nesson and Tenenbaum had thought it out, there might actually have been ways to make a fair use claim stick. But, instead they failed to make a compelling case and (as Gertner says): "propose[d] a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created." So what would such a fair use defense entail?

To be sure, this Court can envision certain circumstances in which a defendant sued for file-sharing could assert a plausible fair use defense. Indeed, an amicus brief previously filed in this consolidated action by the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School (on which Defendant's counsel was a signatory) outlined some of those circumstances--for example, the defendant who 'deleted the MP3 files after sampling them, or created MP3 files exclusively for space-shifting purposes from audio CDs they had previously purchased.' The Court can also envision a fair use defense for a defendant who shared files during a period of time before the law concerning file-sharing was clear and paid outlets were readily available.

The advent of the internet in the late 1990s threw a number of norms into disarray, offering sudden access to a wealth of digitized media and giving the veneer of privacy or anonymity to acts that had public consequences. At the beginning of this period, both law and technology were unsettled. A defendant who shared files online during this interregnum but later shifted to paid outlets once the law became clear and authorized sources available would present a strong case for fair use. It might matter, too, who the defendant shared files with--his friends, or the world--as well as how many copyrighted works, and for how long.

But the Defendant has offered no facts to suggest that he fits within these categories. He is accused of sharing hundreds of songs over a number of years, far beyond the infancy of this new technology or any legal uncertainty.

As with the Jammie Thomas case, it makes you wonder how things would have been different with better legal counsel. Either way, unless there are any major developments, we're unlikely to talk about the day-to-day events of this trial until a ruling is made.

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It looks like the Wii Motion Plus has been hacked so you can read the data via an Arduino. The build only requires about $4 in parts. Now that's cheap! Check out the website for the schematics, code, and more information.

Alright, one great aspect about the Wii Motion Plus is its pass through port for other extension controllers such as the nunchuck. Unfortunately, no one has been able to read both an active motion plus and any other controller at the same time because they are all on the same I2C address(smooth nintendo). This is creates a large hurdle to people like myself who bought the WM+ to create a low cost IMU with it and the accelerometer in the nunchuck. After a good deal of digging and very little luck, I did find a way to use both at the same time(though not through the pass through port). And best of all its cheap!

More about Motion Plus and Nunchuck together on the Arduino [via Arduino.cc]

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

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Back in April, we had a story about how Taser was suing Second Life's parent company Linden Lab because some users in the game had created fake Taser-like virtual stun guns. Yes, seriously. It was hard to see how Linden Lab would be responsible for the actions of its users, but Taser has a long history of being ridiculously overaggressive in trying to protect its brand. However, perhaps someone explained how unlikely its chances were in court, because the company has dropped the lawsuit. Anyone know if Taser-like devices are still around in Second Life?

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levicivita notes ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid: "[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christina La Sala has made these wall hanging mosaics from chewing gum. Anybody have an idea what kind? They'll be on display at the Red Cake Gallery in San Francisco on September 12 at their open house.

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The original purpose of the Associated Press was to pool together resources of various newspapers in order to be able to cover and share reporting on different events around the world. Otherwise, it simply wasn't practical for every local newspaper to have a Washington DC bureau or a London bureau or a Moscow bureau or whatever other location needed news reporting. And then, the idea was that by collectively teaming up, each of the local newspapers could reprint the works from others (and from the AP's own reporters) and have a complete newspaper on their own. But does that even make any sense in an internet era? The NewsFuturist blog notes that the internet has basically done away with the two key reasons that explain the AP's very existence, which probably explains why they're trying out questionable ideas designed to hold back the power of the internet, rather than embracing it. Could there be a place for a modern Associated Press? Absolutely. But its core purpose needs to be entirely different from what it's been for most of the AP's history. Each newspaper doesn't need to copy the same report from the White House briefing room. Everyone can just link to different reports (including more than just one to give multiple perspectives). The whole reason for the AP's very charter makes little sense these days, and it's time for the AP to come to terms with that, and adapt... or go away.

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Here's how to guess the number of M&Ms in a jar using its "packing fraction" - it gets exciting around the 3:30 mark...

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DJ Josef Pr?ša, the author of the iPhone/Arduino/MaxMSP/OSC hack from iPhone Hacks, just let me know about this great project he made from a spare MSI Wind battery; a nice and juicy battery pack for USB devices. He was originally looking for something to power his Monome 128, but it ended up being great for his iPhone as well. And the battery can still be used in the Wind, apparently. He uses a 7805 for this; it would be interesting to see another kind of voltage regulator in a future revision to this.

USB iPhone battery pack from MSI Wind battery

Flickr photo set.

In the Maker Shed:

iPhone Hacks

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An anonymous reader writes "The Obama administration has released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice, following a declassification request by the National Academy of Sciences. The images feature a 1m resolution, and scientists who have had to base climate models on 15m- or 30m-resolution photos are rejoicing. The photos, kept classified by the Bush administration, show the impact of global warming in the Arctic and the retreat of glaciers in Washington and Alaska."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Usually, these days, when companies beg the gov't for protectionist policies against upstart competitors, they at least work out a convoluted story about some sort of real harm (i.e., beyond the bottom line of those asking for protection) caused by the upstart. So, you get the record companies claiming that music will stop being made, or perhaps food companies complaining about the safety standards of foreign food products. There may even be some truth to those stories (or not), but the real reason is to avoid competition. Over in Russia, for example, it appears that a bunch of telco execs are complaining about Skype. They at least try to pass off a plausible non-save-our-asses reason: mentioning security, but they don't do a very good job hiding the truth. Repeatedly they seem to plead that Skype is evil because it makes it difficult for the old guard telcos to charge super high fees. Competition is such a pain sometimes...

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Usually, these days, when companies beg the gov't for protectionist policies against upstart competitors, they at least work out a convoluted story about some sort of real harm (i.e., beyond the bottom line of those asking for protection) caused by the upstart. So, you get the record companies claiming that music will stop being made, or perhaps food companies complaining about the safety standards of foreign food products. There may even be some truth to those stories (or not), but the real reason is to avoid competition. Over in Russia, for example, it appears that a bunch of telco execs are complaining about Skype. They at least try to pass off a plausible non-save-our-asses reason: mentioning security, but they don't do a very good job hiding the truth. Repeatedly they seem to plead that Skype is evil because it makes it difficult for the old guard telcos to charge super high fees. Competition is such a pain sometimes...

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

This article from the NY Times is a great read for those of you who feel, what with the lack of jetpacks and pizzas-in-a-pill, the present just really isn't the future you'd been promised. This is an article in a major, established, old-school publication talking about established scientists hand-wringing about how the robots we're building may become smarter than us, and, um, take over.

It's a fascinating thought, and one that a number of years ago still seemed well within the realm of science fiction. Autonomy has come very far in recent years, and the use of armed, semi-autonomous drones is now commonplace; it just makes sense for scientists and technologists to start thinking about some of these big issues now.

So, don't kick your Roomba.

( Also, it's interesting to take a look at where this all really started.)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

This article from the NY Times is a great read for those of you who feel, what with the lack of jetpacks and pizzas-in-a-pill, the present just really isn't the future you'd been promised. This is an article in a major, established, old-school publication talking about established scientists hand-wringing about how the robots we're building may become smarter than us, and, um, take over.

It's a fascinating thought, and one that a number of years ago still seemed well within the realm of science fiction. Autonomy has come very far in recent years, and the use of armed, semi-autonomous drones is now commonplace; it just makes sense for scientists and technologists to start thinking about some of these big issues now.

So, don't kick your Roomba.

( Also, it's interesting to take a look at where this all really started.)

Several readers sent us updates from the Boston courtroom where, mere hours before the start of trial, a federal judge ruled out fair use as a defense. Wired writes that "the outcome is already shaping up to resemble the only other file sharing trial," in which the RIAA got a $1.92M judgement against Jammie Thomas-Rassert. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, has already essentially admitted to sharing music files, and the entire defense put together by Harvard Prof. Charles Nesson and his students turned on the question of fair use. The judge wrote that the proposed defense would be "so broad it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created." Jury selection is complete and opening arguments will begin tomorrow morning. Here is the Twitter feed organized by Prof. Nesson's law students.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Statistics lauding the growth of the Internet in China have become so commonplace as to inspire yawns, despite breathless press reports of hundreds of millions of Chinese going online and signing up for the 'net. With the Chinese Government declaring that their internet population surpassed the US last year, it would seem that the real opportunity for expansion and growth online is not in the West, but somewhere behind the Great Firewall of China. Cue the ads for Chinese Web Hosting, Chinese Industry Liaisons, and the omnipresent legions of Chinese business agents.

Many Western technology companies have heeded that call, but have found themselves cast onto the rocks of Chinese shores including companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, and Yahoo! The massive markets just never seem to have materialized in the Orient for these giants, or when success has loomed on the horizon the murky Chinese bureaucracy has stepped in to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Partnerships have vaporized overnight, and (particularly in the case of Cisco) core Intellectual Property has been outright stolen, reverse-engineered, or redistributed. Perilous waters, indeed.

So it was with this skepticism that my friend Gersham viewed the latest piece of propaganda emerging from our friends in China that we have now reached the new height of 338 million Chinese Internet users; a 13 percent increase since the end of 2008, and just about exactly one quarter of the country's population. All of this, of course, seems to have been tabulated and distributed by the slightly inaccurately-acronymed Chinese Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) which, by its own admission,takes orders from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to conduct daily business. In fact, google Chinese Internet Traffic and you'd be hard-pressed to find data that did NOT originate from the CNNIC. Hmm. Call me a cynic.

It is likely difficult for most (any) of us to corroborate or even conceptualize these high numbers, but it seems suspicious nonetheless, particularly from a country whose median income is around $3400 and whose Per-Capita GDP is ranked 104th, right behind Armenia. In trying to substantiate this, once can point to Alexa's site rankings which currently reveal that 3 Chinese-language web sites rank in the Top 20: Search Engine Baidu (#9), IM chat and portal QQ (#14), and portal Sina.com.cn (#18). Sounds good, right? But look closely at the rankings. Baidu, an undisputed leader in Search for China, reaches 5.73% of the internet populace, whereas Google.DE (#13) reaches roughly 3% of global internet users while servicing German, Swiss and Austrian users exclusively. Combine the populations of these three countries and they don't even add up to 100 million people.

Gersham pointed me toward the Firefox Download Stats, where, as of this writing, Germans have made 4,948,666 downloads of various Firefox versions compared to only 672,972 for China. Again, Germany has a population of 82Million vs. 1.3Billion in China. As a control, Americans have downloaded Firefox 7,959,727 times as of this writing. Do the Chinese really just prefer Internet Explorer?

In January 2009, Comscore measured the Chinese internet audience at closer to 180 Million users, still an impressive 18% of the Internet population. This site quotes murky Nielsen Online data pegging Chinese Internet Users at roughly 300 Million. Beyond these hearsay reports, empirical measurements are difficult to come by.

So, let’s throw up our hands and try to reverse-engineer the data using published stats. According to June 2009 data from Comscore, Google has captured 65% or so of US Search Traffic. This made it the #1 web site in the world, with 157 Million US Visitors in June, according to Comscore. In the Chinese Market, Baidu has captured 73% of Chinese search, with Google in the Number Two spot. Yet Baidu.com barely moves the needle by comparison, according to compete.com, alexa.com, and others, hitting roughly 600,000 unique visitors per month globally. High-side estimates of the Internet's penetration in the US peg it at 72.5% of the populace, or about 220 million. This makes the data on Google's penetration vs the addressable market reasonably accurate (71% if you do the math). Following this logic, if Baidu in fact has 73% of China's purported 338 Million users, it should be ranking as the #1 web site by far, with 246 Million unique visitors per month. In fact if any of this data were true, then Chinese sites should occupy at least 4 of the Top Ten global web sites.

Whatever your opinion of Compete's and Alexa's relative methodologies, it's impossible to reconcile anything even close to the numbers coming from the Chinese Government. If that isn't good enough for you, let's turn to profits. While serving what was allegedly the world's largest internet audience, Baidu appears to be tracking to earn about $500 Million in revenue this year. Google's revenue appears to be tracking to about $23 Billion for 2009 with its pithy 157 Million unique visitors. Any way you slice it, if China's internet userbase is as large as Beijing says it is, and if Baidu's market share of that audience is what it's widely purported to be, then both the number of uniques reported by external traffic sites and the revenues reported by the public company that owns Baidu should be exponentially greater.

These stats seem to either indicate that Chinese do not use search very often, or that there just aren't too many of them heading out into the wilds of the Internet. Either way, statistics emanating exclusively from bureaucratic sources within Beijing, particularly those which seem to fly in the face of all other external metrics, are not to be believed. The thesis of this post is not to suggest that China is NOT a massive opportunity for online properties and other technology purveyors, it is simply an attempt to point out that, like in a lot of cases in dealing with the People's Republic of China, things are not what they may seem. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Cross-posted from IanBell.com.

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

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