slak11 quotes from a Globe and Mail article on the jump in corporate and government secutiry breaches year-over-year. (The reporting is from Canada but the picture is probably much the same in the US.) "This does not seem to be all that newsworthy these days, since stories like this are appearing on a regular basis. The one detail I did like — that seems to break from the traditional 'hackers cause all the bad stuff' reporting — is the mention that everyday employees are a major cause of breaches. The recent Rocky Mountain Bank/Google story is a perfect example. As stated in the article: 'But lower security budgets aren't the only reason breaches tend to soar during tough economic times — employees themselves can often be the cause of such problems.' I figure this will be an ongoing problem until company management and employees accept their role in keeping company information safe. And IT people need to understand that regular employees are not propeller-heads like Slashdot readers, and to begin to implement technology and processes that average people can understand and use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phil sez, "Errol and Pifie, two members of the 50 Songs in 90 Days songwriting challenge (known as 50/90) have created a nerd-core masterpiece. A rockin' walkthrough to the original ZORK text adventure game."

Walkthrough, MP3 download (Thanks, Phil!)

DVD Jon sez, "Apple's been making an increasing number of anti-consumer moves over the last few years, so we thought it was time to remake their 1984 ad to reflect reality."

Big Brother ad by doubleTwist

Last week, in responding to claims that it would cost ISPs more to police the internet than the music industry claimed it was losing from "piracy," BPI boss Geoff Taylor made a few funny statements, including the ridiculous claim that ISPs used piracy as a part of their "obsolete business model" without any support at all. It appears that Geoff can't stop making stuff up. As he continues to hit back at BT for the cost claims last week, he's now suggesting that BT broke the law in not stopping file sharing:

"It's shameful for a company like BT to know that a high percentage of the traffic it carries is illegal material but do nothing," Taylor told The Mirror. "If you operate a commercial service and know it is being used to break the law, taking steps to ensure it is used legally is a cost of doing business."

Of course, it's not quite accurate to say that BT knows a high percentage of its traffic is illegal material. BT doesn't know that, because it has no real way of knowing exactly what much of the traffic is, or what's authorized and what's not. Furthermore, Taylor is flat out wrong in saying that if you operate a service that is used to break the law, you must stop it. BT also runs a phone service, but no one's saying that it has a responsibility to stop phones from being used in the commission of a crime. BT accurately suggests that if BPI finds evidence of a copyright violation, it should prosecute, but that none of that is BT's issue. I'm reminded of how Australian ISP iiNet responded to similar charges last year:

They send us a list of IP addresses and say 'this IP address was involved in a breach on this date'. We look at that say 'well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person's details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else'. So we say 'you are alleging the person has broken the law; we're passing it to the police. Let them deal with it'.

Once again, it appears the entertainment industry thinks everyone else has to bend over to make sure their old business model still works. But that's not the way the world works.

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Boing Boing reader Patrick Misterovich writes,

My 12 year old son is the singer in a ukulele based indie band called The Scribbles. This video is of a live performance of their song "The Robot Song."

N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've just added a bunch of new content to the Make: Science Room. In "General," we added Bob's brief on how to set up and keep a proper lab notebook, in "Chemistry," we added Section 12 on the fine art of studying reaction rates in chemical processes, called "chemical kinetics," and in "Forensics," we take a look, a VERY close look, at hair and fiber, the bane of violent perps everywhere.

You learn a lot of interesting stuff working with these labs (ah... or editing them). For instance, did you know the different classifications for the types of hair found on a dog? Me neither:

Animal hairs are more differentiated by somatic region and purpose than human hair. Animal hairs are classified as members of four broad types:

* Guard hairs form the outer coat of the animal, shed water, and protect the inner hair and skin
* Fur or wool hairs form the inner coat and provide insulation
* Tactile hairs, also called whiskers, are found on the head (the snout or ears), where they provide sensory functions
* Special-purpose hairs, such as tail hairs and mane hairs, whose morphology may differ substantially from the main body hairs of the animal.

[From: Laboratory 6.4: Study the Morphology of Animal Hair]

And did you know that human and animal hair have different "scale patterns" that can be used in identifying the source head/body?

Figure 6-7 shows the three major types of scale patterns. The imbricate scale pattern is a flattened wavy pattern that is commonly found on human hair and many types of animal hair. The coronal scale pattern is a crown-like pattern that resembles a stack of paper cups, and is normally found only on very fine hair. Coronal scales are found on many types of animal hair and are very rarely present on human hair. The spinous scale pattern is a petal-like pattern made up of triangular scales that protrude from the cuticle. Spinous scales are found in the proximal (root) region of the fur hair of some animals, including bobcat, chinchilla, fox, lynx, mink, mouse, otter, raccoon, rat, sable, sable, seal, and sea lion. Spinous scales are never found in human hair.

[From: Laboratory 6.3: Make Scale Casts of Hair Specimens]

My favorite excerpt from the new Forensics labs (from Laboratory 6.1: Collect Hair Specimens):

Real Life
The three example lines at the top of Table 6-1 are real data, from Robert's stocking cap. The short gray hairs are his. The long black hairs are almost certainly either from one or both of our Border Collies or from Barbara, whose hair is naturally black. Barbara asked Robert who the blond hair belongs to. Uh-oh.

Make: Science Room: fomenting marital strife since 2009.

Make: Science Room >>

More:
Introducing the Make: Science Room
Building the Make: Science Room: A Personal Perspective

In the Maker Shed:

Don't forget, there are TONS of new DIY science-related products in the Maker Shed! They have everything you need to set up a fairly sophisticated home science lab. Check out their impressive Science Room section.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

We've just added a bunch of new content to the Make: Science Room. In "General," we added Bob's brief on how to set up and keep a proper lab notebook, in "Chemistry," we added Section 12 on the fine art of studying reaction rates in chemical processes, called "chemical kinetics," and in "Forensics," we take a look, a VERY close look, at hair and fiber, the bane of violent perps everywhere.

You learn a lot of interesting stuff working with these labs (ah... or editing them). For instance, did you know the different classifications for the types of hair found on a dog? Me neither:

Animal hairs are more differentiated by somatic region and purpose than human hair. Animal hairs are classified as members of four broad types:

* Guard hairs form the outer coat of the animal, shed water, and protect the inner hair and skin
* Fur or wool hairs form the inner coat and provide insulation
* Tactile hairs, also called whiskers, are found on the head (the snout or ears), where they provide sensory functions
* Special-purpose hairs, such as tail hairs and mane hairs, whose morphology may differ substantially from the main body hairs of the animal.

[From: Laboratory 6.4: Study the Morphology of Animal Hair]

And did you know that human and animal hair have different "scale patterns" that can be used in identifying the source head/body?

Figure 6-7 shows the three major types of scale patterns. The imbricate scale pattern is a flattened wavy pattern that is commonly found on human hair and many types of animal hair. The coronal scale pattern is a crown-like pattern that resembles a stack of paper cups, and is normally found only on very fine hair. Coronal scales are found on many types of animal hair and are very rarely present on human hair. The spinous scale pattern is a petal-like pattern made up of triangular scales that protrude from the cuticle. Spinous scales are found in the proximal (root) region of the fur hair of some animals, including bobcat, chinchilla, fox, lynx, mink, mouse, otter, raccoon, rat, sable, sable, seal, and sea lion. Spinous scales are never found in human hair.

[From: Laboratory 6.3: Make Scale Casts of Hair Specimens]

My favorite excerpt from the new Forensics labs (from Laboratory 6.1: Collect Hair Specimens):

Real Life
The three example lines at the top of Table 6-1 are real data, from Robert's stocking cap. The short gray hairs are his. The long black hairs are almost certainly either from one or both of our Border Collies or from Barbara, whose hair is naturally black. Barbara asked Robert who the blond hair belongs to. Uh-oh.

Make: Science Room: fomenting marital strife since 2009.

Make: Science Room >>

More:
Introducing the Make: Science Room
Building the Make: Science Room: A Personal Perspective

In the Maker Shed:

Don't forget, there are TONS of new DIY science-related products in the Maker Shed! They have everything you need to set up a fairly sophisticated home science lab. Check out their impressive Science Room section.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

A newly posted work from Japanese kinetic sculptor Osamu Kanda, whose elegant praying mantis automaton I blogged two weeks ago. This one is called Crawl. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

A newly posted work from Japanese kinetic sculptor Osamu Kanda, whose elegant praying mantis automaton I blogged two weeks ago. This one is called Crawl. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

phenomenal handclap band
sniper twins
ballad of g.i. joe
screaming flailing machine
my territory
domo darko
bear force one
bellyful tv
the take-away shows
sour

previously on web zen:
video killed the radio zen
music viddy zen 2007
music viddy zen 2004
music viddy zen 2003

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter.

CWmike writes "Mozilla executives today took shots at Google for pitching its Chrome Frame plug-in as a solution to Internet Explorer's poor performance, with one arguing that Google's move will result in 'browser soup.' The Mozilla reaction puts the company that builds Firefox on the same side of the debate as rival Microsoft, which has also blasted Google over the plug-in. Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and currently the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, said in a blog post, 'The overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable. I predict positive results will not be enduring and — and to the extent it is adopted — Chrome Frame will end in growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of us, including Web developers.' Baker says Chrome Frame's browser-in-a-browser will confuse users and render some of their familiar tools useless. 'Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it's very hard to manage information across Web sites. Some information will be manageable from the browser you use and some information from Chrome Frame. This defeats one of the most important ways in which a browser can help people manage their [Web] experience.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger writes:

When Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin and I interviewed Throbbing Gristle in Los Angeles, during the sound-check we were talking to Charlie Poulet, TG’s brilliant sound engineer. There was an insanely trippy song coming over the PA system and I asked him what it was. “Oh, THAT. That is a Buddha Machine—ever hear of one?”

A Buddha Machine is a little plastic box that resembles a cheap transistor radio. It has a built-in speaker and runs continuous tape loops of chanting or soothing, natural, trippy, etc, sounds. They are hipster remakes of the Tibetan prayer loop boxes (they’re ubiquitous all over China) and are manufactured by a company called FM3.

Charlie was running several of them at once to create the amazing sound-scape going on in the background as we spoke. A little while later, Chris Carter hinted that soon TG would be announcing a “special musical project” that involved no CD or MP3s whatsoever. I suspected at the time he was hazily describing something similar to a Buddha Machine. TG-stylee and I was right. Check it out!

Metzger has details here on Dangerous Minds. You can order your very own GRISTLEISM here.

With so much effort put towards new laws banning mobile phone use while driving, and installing speed cameras and redlight cameras, you would think that places that were quite aggressive in doing so would see a decrease in the number of auto injuries. After all, isn't that the point of all of this? The UK has been particularly aggressive in such efforts, but as Jeff Nolan alerts us, a new report out in the UK suggests that (despite the gov't's earlier claims) injury accidents have actually increased over time. The government has now been forced to admit that the stats it had been pumping out (which showed a decrease) were faulty, and that the real number of accidents may be as much as three times as high as what it had been reporting. This only came about after the British Medical Journal looked at hospital admission records of those injured in car crashes, and saw the numbers went up as these new efforts were put in place in the UK. We're all for safer driving, but the claims that these measures lead to safer driving aren't supported by the data.

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Here are some of my recent posts about money for Credit.com.

Credit Report Card: A Truly Free Look at Your Credit Record (left): "Credit.com launched a new, truly free online tool called Credit Report Card, which gives you an easy-to-understand snapshot of your credit report, along with estimated scores from the different reporting agencies."

Should I Buy It? A Flowchart to Help You Decide: "The purpose of my 'should I buy it?' question and the purpose of April's flowchart is the same: to force you to stop and think before buying something. Sometimes, a small delay between impulse and action is all it takes to avoid making an unnecessarily costly purchase."

Immunize Yourself Against Sneaky Sales Tactics: "Using insight gleaned from Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational, Jeff Atwood goes through marketers' sleazy tactics, one-by-one, telling you how to avoid falling prey to them."

Can You Save Money with a Self-Watering Gardening Container?: "I bought three 'Ready to Grow Complete Kits' from EarthBox for $55 each and set them up on my deck. Besides all the components (including casters so you can roll the boxes around), they come with potting mix, a bag of organic fertilizer, and a bag of dolomite with trace elements. As the website says, all you need are plants and water."

Using Brain Scans to Beat the Free Rider Problem: "The house I live on is on a private street shard by about 20 other houses. The City of Los Angeles does not maintain the street, so when repairs are needed, the residents must pay for them. Over the last couple of years, a lot of big potholes have formed. Several of the residents decided something needed to be done about it, and sent copies of repair estimates to everyone who lives on the street. If everyone pitched in an equal amount, the price per household would be $2,500 to fix the street. Most of the households paid the $2,500, but a few refused to pay."

The High Price of Ignoring the Future: "Would you rather be given £45 in three days, or £70 in three months? That was the question put to 40,000 people who took part in an experiment conducted by the BBC and the University College of London."

Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation: "Dan has been studying the psychology of human motivation. In this video, Dan offers some counter-intuitive advice about using financial rewards to incentivize people."

Would You Steal Medicine to Save Your Spouse's Life?: "Heinz broke into the drugstore and stole the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that?"

Money Can Buy Happiness, After All, as Long as You Don't Spend it on Yourself : "It turns out that money can buy happiness -- provided you spend it on the right things."

The Curse of Winning the Lottery: "This article reports on the sad fates of eight lottery winners who experienced bankruptcy, drug abuse, and sometimes even prison as a result of winning the lottery."

Space history will be made this week: the first clown launched into orbit. Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberté, the circus entrepreneur behind Cirque du Soleil, was once a street performer. Now he's a space performer. Apparently, he's planning to put on a show during the trip. BBC News, MSNBC, space.com. I hope they don't cross paths with the Killer Klowns from Outer Space. (Image: Space Adventures/ONE DROP Foundation)

Don't forget we're running an awesome Garrett Wade tool giveaway. Two winners will be chosen to receive either a push drill or a set of old school heavy-duty ("tank") screw drivers Sean Ragan reviewed in the latest Toolbox column of MAKE.

To be eligible, just go to the original post and tell us what you'd do with the tool you're most interested in. Eligible comments will be closed tomorrow at 12-noon PST. We're loving all of the comments we've gotten so far and the interesting projects people are working on or thinking about.

Garrett Wade tool giveaway time

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toolbox | Digg this!

Don't forget we're running an awesome Garrett Wade tool giveaway. Two winners will be chosen to receive either a push drill or a set of old school heavy-duty ("tank") screw drivers Sean Ragan reviewed in the latest Toolbox column of MAKE.

To be eligible, just go to the original post and tell us what you'd do with the tool you're most interested in. Eligible comments will be closed tomorrow at 12-noon PST. We're loving all of the comments we've gotten so far and the interesting projects people are working on or thinking about.

Garrett Wade tool giveaway time

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Almost 100 years ago, John Krubsack made this amazing chair by growing a bunch of box elder trees together. What makes this extra special is that he figured out how to graft the trees together as they were growing, so that they naturally formed all of the joints to hold it together. The whole thing took about 11 years to grow. In this age of rapid prototyping, I can hardly imagine spending that long on a project. It just might be possible, however, to make a miniature version for a mouse out of some brassica rapa plants.

Oh, and if you are looking to raise your own furniture, treehugger has some plans to grow
a three-legged stool.

[via neatorama]

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Almost 100 years ago, John Krubsack made this amazing chair by growing a bunch of box elder trees together. What makes this extra special is that he figured out how to graft the trees together as they were growing, so that they naturally formed all of the joints to hold it together. The whole thing took about 11 years to grow. In this age of rapid prototyping, I can hardly imagine spending that long on a project. It just might be possible, however, to make a miniature version for a mouse out of some brassica rapa plants.

Oh, and if you are looking to raise your own furniture, treehugger has some plans to grow
a three-legged stool.

[via neatorama]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Furniture | Digg this!

TechnologyResource writes "When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message — people just don't call me that often. But the iPhone is indeed a phone, as some users are reportedly being reminded when they get phone calls from the publishers of a free app they've downloaded from the App Store. The application in question, mogoRoad, is a real-time traffic monitoring application. As invasive and despicable as that sounds, it raises another question: how did the company get hold of the contact information for those users? Mogo claims the details were provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't disclose that information to App Store vendors. French site Mac 4 Ever did some digging (scroll down for the English version) and determined it was possible — even easy — for an app to retrieve the phone number of a unit on which it was installed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

We've mentioned in the past how silly it is that Apple blocks the Palm Pre and other devices from accessing iTunes. Plenty of people responded, pointing out that Apple really makes its money on the hardware, and thus it makes no sense to allow other hardware products to connect to iTunes. While I agree that Apple makes its money off the hardware, I still disagree that Apple should block others out. In doing so, it makes me and many others less likely to purchase an Apple product, because I don't want to get trapped into Apple hardware. I'd much rather a more open solution.

Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo has written up a wonderful explanation of why Apple should not just allow the Palm Pre and others to connect to iTunes, but it should encourage it. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a snippet:

I hope the company continues to search for ways to sync with iTunes, because the fight--silly as it seems--is important, and Palm is clearly in the right. Apple may have the USB-IF on its side, and it may also be protected by copyright law. But by blocking non-Apple devices from its music app, Apple is violating a more fundamental principle of computing--that unalike devices should be able to connect to one another freely. The principle underlies everything we take for granted in tech today: It's why the Internet, your home network, and the PC function at all. And it's why Palm should keep storming the iTunes fortress.

I am not claiming that Palm has the legal right to hack into Apple's software, nor am I calling on any authorities to compel Apple to let Palm in; if the cat-and-mouse game turns into a courtroom brawl, it's very likely that Apple would win the fight. Instead, I'm calling on Apple to stand down. Even better: It should create a legal pathway for Palm and every other company to sync with iTunes. Why? The most obvious reason is that it's good for iTunes users. Nobody other than Apple benefits from locked-down software. Apple frequently extols the wonders of digital music--the convenience, the flexibility, the environmental friendliness. But how flexible can it be if you're allowed to sync your tunes only with devices made by a single company?

What's more, the iTunes block is hypocritical. Like every other tech company, Apple has benefited enormously from the spirit of interconnectedness that pervades the tech industry. The iPod would have fizzled if Microsoft had blocked it from hooking up to Windows PCs. Or look at the iPhone--Apple is proud that it can sync with Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, and just about everything else. Indeed, you could argue that Apple, once left for dead on the periphery of the tech industry, managed to come back only because it skillfully marketed Macs as the most promiscuous computers you could buy.

Indeed. While it's unlikely that Apple will actually do this, it would be a smart move. No one's buying Apple hardware because it syncs with iTunes. They're buying it for many other reasons, and Apple can continue to compete on those. Blocking the Pre and other devices from accessing iTunes is petty and unnecessary.

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The original art for some of Norman Saunders' fantastic Nutty Initials stickers are being auctioned on eBay right now. They were produced by Topps in 1967.

NORMAN SAUNDERS (1907 - 1989) was a prolific commercial artist who produced paintings for pulp magazines, paperbacks, men's adventure magazines, comic books, and trading cards. On occasion, he signed his work with his middle name, "Blaine." These distinctive characters were probably inspired by the work of Basil Wolverton. Painted fairly small, the piece as a whole measures 3.5" x 4.75, and there is some minor paint chipping in the black areas surrounding the monster, and glue residue on the reverse. Very good condition otherwise.

Nutty Initials stickers (Via Anonymous Works)

As Google Wave is about to be released to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow, reader snitch writes in with a link to an in-depth interview with Dhanji Prasanna, whose title is Core Engineer. It covers some of the technologies, tools, and best practices used in building Wave. "InfoQ: Would you like to give us a short technical outline of what happens to a message (blip) from the moment a user types it in the web client, until becomes available to every one else that is participating in that wave — humans or robots? ... Dhanji: Sure, a message written in the client is transformed into a series of operations that are sent to the server in real time. After authenticating and finding the appropriate user session, the ops are routed to the hosted conversation. Here these ops are transformed and applied against other incoming op streams from other users. The hosted conversation then broadcasts the valid set of changes back to other users, and to any listening robots. This includes special robots like the ones that handle spell checking, and one that handles livesearch (seen in the center search-panel), as well as explicit robotic participants that people have developed. Robotic participants write their changes in response to a user's and these are similarly converted into ops, applied and re-broadcast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Malki, who does the awesome Victorian-era webcomic Wondermark, has created a hysterical steampunky genre-fiction generator.

Liam Cooke created an automated version of the chart. Here's the story synopsis I got:

The Psychopunks
In a metaphorical Outer Rim world, a young milquetoast office drone stumbles across a time-traveling soldier which spurs him into conflict with supernatural monsters, with the help of a tomboyish female mechanic and her welding gear, culminating in a daring rescue preceding a giant explosion.

[Thanks, Jonathan Johns!]

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Dave Malki, who does the awesome Victorian-era webcomic Wondermark, has created a hysterical steampunky genre-fiction generator.

Liam Cooke created an automated version of the chart. Here's the story synopsis I got:

The Psychopunks
In a metaphorical Outer Rim world, a young milquetoast office drone stumbles across a time-traveling soldier which spurs him into conflict with supernatural monsters, with the help of a tomboyish female mechanic and her welding gear, culminating in a daring rescue preceding a giant explosion.

[Thanks, Jonathan John!]

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I just checked the freezer and discovered I was down to my last bag. Don't let Halloween sneak up on you without stocking up.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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I just checked the freezer and discovered I was down to my last bag. Don't let Halloween sneak up on you without stocking up.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

After releasing the "Open source Homeland Security non-lethal weapon - The Do-it-yourself handheld LED-based Incapacitator" a few folks around the web emailed or posted saying "you can't build that for yourself, or even for fun, it's patented!" - This comes up once and awhile in the world of making things, perhaps it's a good conversation starter- here's a snip from a wikipedia article on "Research exemption"...

"In patent law, the research exemption or safe harbour exemption is an exemption to the rights conferred by patents"...

... and from a previous case where this seems to have been tested, the court(s) said -

"experimental use defense" for "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry."

We're not lawyers, this is not legal advice - that said, this seems to makes sense. Imagine drug companies needing to wait until a patent expires to figure out if they can make a generic drug... or imagine everyone sitting on their hands not able to test the claims on a patent for "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry"... making things for yourself to see how things work is fun - do research on your own about things you see/hear as well as questioning what "armchair patent experts" say on the internet. Oh, the "Do-it-yourself handheld LED-based Incapacitator" is not for sale, it's not a kit, but you can read all about it.

Agree, disagree? Have something to add? Post up in the comments with your thoughts!

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After releasing the "Open source Homeland Security non-lethal weapon - The Do-it-yourself handheld LED-based Incapacitator" a few folks around the web emailed or posted saying "you can't build that for yourself, or even for fun, it's patented!" - This comes up once and awhile in the world of making things, perhaps it's a good conversation starter- here's a snip from a wikipedia article on "Research exemption"...

"In patent law, the research exemption or safe harbour exemption is an exemption to the rights conferred by patents"...

... and from a previous case where this seems to have been tested, the court(s) said -

"experimental use defense" for "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry."

We're not lawyers, this is not legal advice - that said, this seems to makes sense. Imagine drug companies needing to wait until a patent expires to figure out if they can make a generic drug... or imagine everyone sitting on their hands not able to test the claims on a patent for "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry"... making things for yourself to see how things work is fun - do research on your own about things you see/hear as well as questioning what "armchair patent experts" say on the internet. Oh, the "Do-it-yourself handheld LED-based Incapacitator" is not for sale, it's not a kit, but you can read all about it.

Agree, disagree? Have something to add? Post up in the comments with your thoughts!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

pickens writes "In a victory for Fair Use, Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project has announced that the estate of 20th century literary giant James Joyce, author of the landmark novel Ulysses, has agreed to pay $240,000 in attorneys' fees to Stanford University Consulting Professor Carol Shloss and her counsel in connection with Shloss's lawsuit to establish her right to use copyrighted material in her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce. When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate. However following publication of the book, Shloss sued the Estate to establish her right to publish the excised material. The parties reached a settlement regarding the issue in 2007, permitting the publication of the copyrighted material in the US. Following the settlement, Shloss asked the Court to order the Estate to pay attorneys' fees of more than $400,000. She has now agreed to accept an immediate payment of $240,000 in return for the dismissal of the Estate's appeal. 'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent ruling by the Copyright Board of Canada has changed how much schools had to pay for copying educational materials, such as textbooks, newspapers and magazines. Michael Geist lets us know that collections group Access Copyright, apparently wasted little time before sending bills that reached hundreds of thousands of dollars to various school districts. Apparently, you can't educate kids unless you pay up.

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The They Might Be Giants love just doesn't stop over here, check out Theremin Cat by Hine Mizushima for TMBG's Here Comes Science.

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The They Might Be Giants love just doesn't stop over here, check out Theramin Cat by Hine Mizushima for TMBG's Here Comes Science.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

I reviewed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for Good. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's an excerpt of my review:

William Kamkwamba's parents couldn't afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son's school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family's corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word "grapes" meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, "The book has since changed my life."

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. "A windmill meant more than just power," he wrote, "it was freedom."

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it's another thing altogether. It's nothing short of monumental.

Read the rest of my review at GOOD.

William Kamkwamba visits Baobab Health Trust founder and TED Fellow Gerry Douglas' home in Lilongwe, Malawi. Gerry is giving William a lesson in machining helicopter and windmill blades with various types of cutters. (It was very exciting to read that William's favorite magazine is MAKE!) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

I reviewed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for Good. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's an excerpt of my review:

William Kamkwamba's parents couldn't afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son's school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family's corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word "grapes" meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, "The book has since changed my life."

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. "A windmill meant more than just power," he wrote, "it was freedom."

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it's another thing altogether. It's nothing short of monumental.

Read the rest of my review at GOOD.

William Kamkwamba visits Baobab Health Trust founder and TED Fellow Gerry Douglas' home in Lilongwe, Malawi. Gerry is giving William a lesson in machining helicopter and windmill blades with various types of cutters. (It was very exciting to read that William's favorite magazine is Make!) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

alphadogg writes "Mobile users face a fast-growing gap between their smartphones' increasing power needs and battery capacity. That gap could force users to make tradeoffs in how, and for what, they use their phones, even as vendors at all levels work even harder to reduce power demand in mobile devices, according to Chris Schreck, a research analyst with IMS Research. Schreck estimates that a 1500 mAh battery, the industry's current 'high water mark,' yields for many smartphone users a battery life of about 6 hours — highly dependent on what applications and on-device technologies, including Wi-Fi, users are running. The latest and greatest tech advances, including faster CPUs, higher data throughput, and improved displays all crank up the demand for power. The combination of user behavior and technology is boosting power demand faster than battery capacity can keep up. Schreck estimates power requirements can grow 15% a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1957, James Vicary famously flashed subliminal advertising messages on a movie screen and claimed it boosted sales of refreshments. Vicary later admitted that he had lied about the results. Since then, the effectiveness of subliminals has been the subject of some debate. A new study from University College London suggests that negative subliminal messages can work, at least in a laboratory setting. The researchers flashed a series of positive (cheerful, etc.), negative (agony, etc.), or neutral (box, etc.) words on a screen but not long enough for them to be consciously read. When the subjects were asked if the words they couldn't consciously have read were positive, negative, or neutral, they accurately categorized 66% of the negative word. From the BBC News:

The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words, even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer. They were able to accurately categorise 66% of the negative words compared to 50% of the positive ones.

Subliminal advertising is not permitted on television in the UK.

But Professor (Nillie) Lavie said her work could be applicable to marketing campaigns: "Negative words may have more of a rapid impact - "Kill Your Speed" should work better than "Slow Down".

Kill your boredom by reading Boing Boing!!!

"More controversially, a competitor's negative qualities may work on a subconscious level much more effectively than shouting about your own selling points."

"Negative subliminal messages work"

Issue #55 of ultradesigned fashion/art/culture magazine is a gorgeous slipcased collection of pop-up designed by the likes of Andreas Gursky, Steven Meisel, Sophie Calle, and engineered by Bruce Foster. As Mark F said, watching the lovely promotional video on the Visionaire site is probably nearly as satisfying as actually owning a copy of the issue, which sells for $250. Visionaire: Surprise (Thanks, Gareth Branwyn!)

I've pointed out in the past, that any time you hear a company talk about their business model in terms of "if we only get 1% of that market... we'll still be huge," you should run away (and, it's even more ridiculous when you hear some talk about 10% or 15% of a market). This is top down thinking, but it's not how businesses work. There's no guarantee of any percent. Instead, any business needs to focus on bottom up reasoning -- explaining why the very first person will buy. Then the second. Then the third, and so on. Taking the top down approach is wishful thinking. It's making a huge assumption that people will just buy. Taking the bottom up approach is actually building a business. It's recognizing who the customer is, what they want and how to best get it to them. It's tempting to do the top down approach, because it looks so tantalizing and easy. But business isn't easy. It's hard work.

I'm reminded of this, with a submission from JohnForDummies about a Derek Sivers blog post, discussing a musician friend who took out an ad in a magazine with 1 million subscribers, repeatedly saying:

"If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD... that'll be 10,000 copies! And that's only one percent!"

But, as the musician learned there are numbers much smaller than 1%, as he ended up selling just 4 copies of the CD.

This is, in some ways, similar to the give it away and pray business models that we sometimes see people trying. Giving stuff away for free is a good part of a business model, but it's not an entire business model by a longshot. Anyone looking to use free as a part of a business model also needs to go further and do the hard part, the bottom up part, where they figure out how they're going to get anyone (not a percentage, but specific people) to actually find something worth paying for on its own. Because $0 from a million people is still $0. But, reaching 1,000 people with something of value that they want and can't get any other way... that's the start of a business model.

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If you've ever wondered why there are so many types of capacitors, and how to choose the right one for your project, you should definitely catch the latest installment of David L. Jones' EEVblog. He's got a whole bunch of practical knowledge to share in his wonderful style. I sure learned a lot, even after working with these things for years!

Just looking for a introduction on how to use a capacitor? Check out MAKE presents: The Capacitor.

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I reviewed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for Good. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's an excerpt of my review:

William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family’s corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

Read the rest of my review at GOOD.

(It was very exciting to read that William's favorite magazine is Make!)

An anonymous reader writes 'Sean Lind over at PokerListings has written a really interesting piece on how to configure Rock Band (or Guitar Hero) instruments to use them as controllers for playing online poker. The instructions given in his how-to could really be used to configure the instruments for any game.' Or how about a genuine chording keyboard?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

One of the weirdest and most wonderful sites on the map of spiritual Los Angeles is the Philosophical Research Society (PRS). Occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901-1990) opened this Mayan-Egyptian-art-deco campus in the Griffith Park neighborhood in 1934. Hall was the author of the legendary encyclopedia of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (quoted in the epigraph to Dan Brown's latest novel), and he designed the Philosophical Research Society, or PRS, as his sanctum and school. I'm speaking at PRS this coming Saturday, October 3rd and Sunday, October 4th, at 2 p.m. daily on the history of the occult in America. I'll be considering everything from the career of Manly P. Hall to the growth of "mind power" mysticism. From Occult America:

Hall fancifully spoke of modeling his headquarters after the ancient mystery school of Pythagoras. More practically, PRS provided a cloistered setting where Hall spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and assembling a remarkable collection of antique texts and devotional objects. His small campus eventually grew to include a 50,000-volume library with catwalks and floor-to-ceiling shelves; a 300-seat auditorium with a throne-like chair for the master teacher; a bookstore; a warehouse for the many titles he wrote and sold; a wood-paneled office (complete with a walk-in vault for antiquities); and a sunny stucco courtyard. Designed in an unusual pastiche of Mayan, Egyptian, and art-deco motifs, PRS became one of the most popular destinations for L.A.'s spiritually curious, and remains so.

Philosophical Research Society</a

An anonymous reader writes "I am an artist working with 3d software to create animations and digital prints. For now my work just gets put on screening DVDs and BluRays and the original .mov and 3d files get backed up. But museums and big art collectors do want to purchase these animations. However as we all know archival DVDs are not really archival. So I want to ask the Slashdot readers, what can I give to the museum when they acquire my digital work for their collection so that it can last and be seen long after I am dead? No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet, so I thought Slashdot readers may have an idea. These editions can be sold for a large amount of money, so it doesn't have to be a cheap solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Linnell e-mailed us these shots showing a clever hack he uses to bend small plastic strips at his soldering station. The soldering pencil is reversed in the holder to position its barrel near the surface of the strip held in the "helping hands." Radiant heat from the barrel softens the plastic along a parallel line for folding. Michael adds, "Just make sure you leave about 1/4 to 1/8 inch of air space between the pencil and the plastic. Both of the items used for this bender are standard Radio Shack items."

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One of our readers, Jay Anderson, writes in to let us know that he was working on a useful little app to let people put in their zip code, find local movies, and click through to buy tickets. In doing so, he found an undocumented API on a major site that provided all the relevant info, and linked back to MovieShowtimes.com, a site owned by West World Media. Anderson contacted the site to find out if it had some sort of affiliate program since it was reasonable to assume the site would be happy to gain some free traffic. No such luck. Instead, he got back a threatening letter, warning him that he was opening himself up to copyright infringement damages that could be upwards of $600,000 per month.

You need to know it is unlawful and a violation of our copyright and intellectual property rights for you to build a system that obtains our content from any source other than to obtain an expressed license from West World Media for legal usage of our content. Each violation of our Intellectual property rights allows us to collect damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. This would equate in liquid damages of over $600,000 per month if you violate our rights.

Anderson responded, asking the company how factual information (such as movie times) could be covered by copyright, and the company responded:

"It is not our responsibility or duty to explain complex US Intellectual Property rights law, we however enjoy many protections from them. I suggest you hire an IP attorney to explain it to you. From your response, it seems to me you have no intentions of moving forward in a legal manner. We closely monitor any and all usage of our content and if we discover your unlawful usage of it, we will exercise our rights to their fullest extent of the law."

Now, obviously, the company makes its money by licensing its database of showtimes to certain websites, but that information is factual, and it's difficult to see how the company could hold a copyright on it (at least in the US, where there's no real "database right" -- elsewhere... perhaps a different story). There's also no creative element in merely listing showtimes, and it's hard to see how they would possibly be covered by copyright. If the problem is that the company is upset that its business model can't handle other people sending it traffic, that's a business model problem, not a copyright problem. Time to redesign the business model to take a cut of sales, rather than to rely on artificial copyrights. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't stop a company from making such threats...

Separately, this reminds me of the fact that, just a few months ago, we were talking about how the movie times in newspapers were apparently paid advertisements by the theaters themselves. So, this seems like an odd switch as well: newspapers get paid for movie listings, but websites have to pay for them? How does that work?

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On his blog, Jonathan Turley writes that this video "appears to show Pittsburgh police during G20 protests using an arrested citizen as a prop for a group photo." That's what it looks like to me, too. (Via The Agitator)

schwit1 writes "The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bookride (a marvelous blog about dealing in rare books) mentioned Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen, with this sample howler entitled "Another Irish one":

An Irish Census recorder on enquiring - 'How many males in this house?' received the reply - 'Three of course; breakfast, lunch and tea!'

Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen

Here's the standout bit from the latest Harper's Weekly Review:

A Pennsylvania judge ruled that a police officer who orally violated five calves was not guilty of animal cruelty, pointing out that it was impossible to know whether the young cows were "tormented" or "puzzled," or even irritated that the policeman's penis was not actually food. "If the cow had the cognitive ability to form thought and speak," reflected Judge James Moreley, "Would it say, 'Where's the milk? I'm not getting any milk.'"

(A NY Daily News article reports that this happened in New Jersey, not Pennsylvania, and that the Judge's name is Morely, not Moreley, as reported in the Weekly Review. The police officer, Robert Melia Jr., , has also been charged with sexually assaulting three girls.)

Harper's Weekly Review by Claire Gutierrez

Instructables user hivoltage shows us how to pour and polish a concrete desk top, even with some embedded fiber optic cables. Looks great!

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Google's legal threat against an open source Android developer who made a replacement phone firmware that ran faster than Google's own slow-and-poky version has sparked a commitment to replace all of Google's proprietary apps with free alternatives. Cyanogen, an Android dev, made much-loved Android OSes that bundled in Google's default apps, like Google Maps, and Google says that this violates their copyrights and has ordered him to stop. They're probably right as a matter of law, but this is infra-dumb as a business question: Google's default Android OS is very slow, and shipping these improved OSes only makes the pitch for Android more attractive.

Google, however, appears to be significantly less permissive on this front than Microsoft. The company's legal department objects to the Cyanogen mod on the basis of its inclusion of Google's proprietary software. They sent Kondik a cease and desist order compelling him to remove the mod from his Web site. The Android enthusiast community has responded fiercely, condemning Google for taking a heavy-handed approach. Even Google's own Android team appears to be frustrated with the legal department's zeal. After the news about the cease and desist broke, Google developer Jean-Baptiste Queru posted a message on Twitter suggesting that he could be pursuing alternate employment opportunities.

Kondik expressed disgust with the entire situation, but has been working with Google to find a reasonable resolution. He remains optimistic that he can accommodate Google's requirements and still make his mod available to users. In a blog entry posted Sunday, he explained how he plans to move forward. The Cyanogen mod will no longer include Google's proprietary applications. Instead, users who have "Google Experience" phones will back up those applications to external media and will restore them after installing the modded ROM. He is building a special tool to facilitate the backup and restoration process.

Irate Android devs aim to replace Google's proprietary bits

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

Never before have I seen my community photographed with such dignity and hope . Omar Mullick, an award winning photographer who shoots for National Geographic, NY Times, etc., has traveled all across America for 7 years documenting the elusive Muslim American community.

The photography will be on display at GalleryFCB Thursday, October 8th at 6:00 pm. The gallery runs for the entire month, but please join us at the opening of this historic exhibit. RSVP on the Facebook Event if you can.

Omar has given me the permission to showcase a handful of photos here at Boing Boing.

More images and info after the jump.

The first time I saw the photos I wondered why Omar chose black and white. Looking through the gallery statement on the site, I found my answer:

At a time when President Obama used the example of American Muslims in his Cairo address to indicate that Islam had "always been a part of America's story..." the exhibit presents a culmination of one photographers deliberate effort to take the visual language of black and white 35mm photography, through which 20th Century America has often looked at itself, and open up that narrative to include the latest birth pang in American cultural life. To that end, Can't Take It With You, which was pursued with singular purpose by a photographer deeply engaged with the idea of what it means to be American, promises to be one of the more important visual documents of the young 21st Century.

The photo I leave you with is of a Muslim women's shelter in Philadelphia, PA. It was the children's first day at the shelter. I wonder where they are now.

I will be doing a tiny interview with Omar Mullick at the end of the week, if anyone has a question they feel compelled to ask please write it in the comments and I'll try my best to get it answered.

Visit the Can't Take It With You site - www.galleryfcb.com

See more of Omar's work on his personal site - www.omarmullick.com

Love this Parenthacks tip: when you put kids' food in a friend's fridge during a playdate, put your keys in with the food and you won't forget to bring it with you.

You won't forget items stored in a friend's fridge if you toss your keys in as well

itwbennett writes "Google recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steve Kondik, the creator of Cyanogen, a popular souped-up version of Android, asking him to stop distributing applications such as Gmail with his modified software. 'We make some of these apps available to users of any Android-powered device via Android Market, and others are pre-installed on some phones through business deals,' wrote Dan Morrill on the Android developer blog. 'Either way, these apps aren't open source, and that's why they aren't included in the Android source code repository.' Now, Kondik thinks he's found a workaround. He plans to release a 'bare bones' version of Cyanogen without the applications, leaving it to modders to make a backup copy of the Google applications that shipped with their phone for later reinstallation before hacking away at the Android software. 'The idea is that you'll be able to Google-ify your CyanogenMod installation with the applications and files that shipped on your device already,' Kondik wrote."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The submissions for Connecting-with-Fans (CwF) stories are ramping up these days, and here's a cautionary tale from thublihnk who writes "... one of the guys behind Borderlands (an upcoming online multiplayer FPS/RPG) promised to play with/give loot to anyone who preordered his game, and due to a game journalist alerting people to this deal, is now swamped with requests. Good try, better luck next time?"

So this doesn't actually sound too bad for Mike Neumann, the Creative Director of Gearbox, who promoted his game by tweeting a promise to play with anyone who pre-ordered it, even if the number of folks who viewed his offer is in the thousands (so far, though, it sounds like the number is more like hundreds). Neumann says he'll hold up his end of the bargain, but he's also asked fans if they'd accept playing with the CEO of Gearbox instead of just him, which seems perfectly reasonable. It's not like Neumann promised he'd show up in everyone's living room. He also didn't specify how long he'd play with these fans, so there are a few loopholes that will allow him to live a normal life -- assuming his normal life didn't already include hours and hours of gaming. And presumably, superfans are not out to destroy him, though, it might be a bit embarrassing if Neumann turns out to be a total N00b at playing his own game. But, yes, the lesson here for creative CwF promotions is to make sure to think through the consequences. Fortunately for Gearbox, the virtual loot in Borderlands has zero marginal costs.

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We're going to combine this week's Rebooting the News with next week's and do it Saturday afternoon live in San Francisco. Jay will be in town for the Online News Association meeting, and of course I live a BART ride away in Berkeley, so we'll meet at 4:30PM and do a 75-minute Rebooting the News special, and you're invited!

We're looking for a place that's very near to the Hilton. If you have a conference room nearby, within say a 5 minute walk, would you like to host this small meetup? We'd find an appropriate way to thank you in the podcast.

Also, please post a comment below if you'd like to come. Can't guarantee how much room we'll have, we may end up doing it at a Starbuck's!

Where would the maker be without his/her tools?? Here are some of the tools in my shop that I use every day. Read more about them here. I'd love to here from other makers. What tools can't you live without??

More:
Toolbox: Ten tools you won't want to live without

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ptorrone writes "Hardware hacker extraordinaires Ladyada (Adafruit Industries) and Phil Torrone (of MAKE magazine) have just published an open source 'Homeland Security' project, a non-lethal LED-Based Incapacitator: THE BEDAZZLER. After attending a conference where the $1 million 'sea-sick flashlight' (THE DAZZLER) was demoed by Homeland Security, the duo decided to created an under-$250 version, and just released the source code, schematics and PCB files. The team also released a 5 minute video describing the 'official version' as well as how they created the 'open source hardware' version."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ACD Systems has released the final version of its ACDSee Pro 3 image browsing software, that was previously available for beta testing. It features an improved interface, more online publishing tools and advanced image processing options allowing both non-destructive and pixel-level editing on most file formats. The software is available for a free 30-day trial and for purchase at US $169.99 via the ACD Systems website.

I like these integral-color plywood materials from Brookside Veneers. Pricey but neat looking.

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Samsung Electronics has released the AMOLED 12M mobile phone which contains a 12 megapixel camera complete with zoom rocker, shutter button and mode dial. The phone's camera has a 3x optical zoom and includes features seen in recent compact cameras including 720p HD video recording, AF Tracking, Smart Auto and Face Recognition. All other functions are controlled via a WVGA (800x480 pixels, 1,152,000 dots) AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) touch screen display. Initiailly only available in the Korean market, the phone/camera is a product of Samsung Electronics, which contains Samsung's mobile phone business. The company is reported to be considering absorbing Samsung's digital camera business - currently a separate company called Samsung Digital Imaging.

sonnejw0 writes "Sea-faring vessels are a major contributor of greenhouse gas production due to a deficit in international laws and inherent inefficiencies at sea, such as barnacle build-up on hulls. Many marine animals avoid the build-up of drag-inducing barnacles through secreting oily residues from their pores or through the nano-molecular arrangement of their skin. Sailors regularly defoul their hulls, removing the barnacles at dry-dock, which requires them to reduce the amount of time they have at sea. Some synthetic chemicals in paints have been used to prevent barnacle build-up but have been found to be toxic to marine animals and thus outlawed by several nations. Now, engineers are trying to replicate the skin of marine animals to produce a slippery hull to which marine bacteria cannot attach, saving fuel costs and improving speeds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rob H alerts us to an article that starts out sounding reasonable... pointing out that politicians in the EU are meeting because they're worried about intellectual property laws holding back innovation in Europe... but then it goes off the rails. You see, they're not worried that the laws are holding back innovation because they're too strict, but because they're too weak. As you look, though, you realize that these politicians have basically been lobbied by businesses that want protectionist policies. The "report" they discuss talks not about how to better incentivize innovation, but how to "better favour business." What that means is they went and spoke with a bunch of incumbent businesses, not innovative startups, and those businesses said they want more patents. Someone should send them a copy of Boldrin and Levine's book...

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dreemteem writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK:"SharePoint is a brilliant success, for a couple of reasons. In a way, it's Microsoft's answer to GNU/Linux: cheap and simple enough for departments to install without needing to ask permission, it has proliferated almost unnoticed through enterprises to such an extent that last year SharePoint Sales were $1.3 billion. But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits, it has one other key characteristic, hinted at in the Wikipedia entry above: it offers an effortless way for people to put content into the system, but makes it very hard to get it out because of its proprietary lock-in. This makes it a very real threat to open source. For example, all of the gains made in the field of open document standards — notably with ODF — are nullified if a company's content is trapped inside SharePoint." The article offers a slice of hope for getting around that, though, in the form of a new API for Google Sites which can slurp the data back out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

lostinbrave notes laboratory work that could lead to long-haul network cables capable of exceeding 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. "Alcatel-Lucent said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables, resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer. This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer, or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. ... The transmissions were not just faster, they were accomplished over a network whose repeaters are 20 percent farther apart than commonly maintained in such networks, which could decrease the costs of deploying such a network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York artist Jason Hackenwerth makes quite an impressive array of creatures using that staple material of clowns, the venerable party balloon. He makes both static sculptures and wearable ones. How long does it take to make such things? The time lapse video above documents 8 hours of work to make one creature, minus some amount of dancing around. Neat stuff!

If you happen to be in Grand Rapids, MI, in the next few weeks, you should definitely check out his work at the UICA.

[thanks John Baichtal!]

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MBCook writes "Jamie Zawinski, shortly after the release of the Palm Pre, wrote two free software programs for the phone: a Tip Calculator and a port of Dali Clock. In trying to get the apps published to the App Catalog, he has had to sign up to be a developer twice; fax contracts around; been told (apparently incorrectly) that he was not allowed to release free software for the phone; and told he had to give PayPal his checking account number. 'It's been two weeks, and I have received no reply. In the months since this process began, other third-party developers seem to have managed to get their applications into the App Catalog. Apparently these people are better at jumping through ridiculous hoops than I am.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scoble says the iPhone version of Tweetie is so excellent that it might be the one everyone switches to. I don't know about that, I'm seriously considering a divorce from my iPhone, so I don't care so much about iPhone apps.

He specifically calls out Seesmic who doesn't yet have an iPhone app.

While I use my iPhone for tethering (and won't install the 3.1 upgrade because it would kill that) -- Scoble is tethered to his iPhone for everything. He does all his tweeting and friendfeeding from the iPhone. I find this both amazing and ridiculous. So many compromises. I guess Scoble values connectivity above all else, and wants to travel light.

He really wants a curating application, which I have, it's the app that manages my 40 Twits page. I've released it as open source, and set up an account for Scbole, but it doesn't work on the iPhone because it depends on a bookmarklet and I guess they don't work on the iPhone? I don't know enough about it to say for sure.

Bookmarklets make a lot of things possible. If they don't work on the iPhone then Apple should get to it and make them work. (Apparently they do.)

So Scoble is taking another tack to get what he wants. He's trying to scare Seesmic into providing the "curation" feature for him in their non-existent iPhone app. It would be simple, just a slight variant on retweeting. Maybe they don't want to do it because retweeting will soon get an overhaul. (And imho will finally work as it always should have.)

Which brings me to the point of the piece. Maybe Twitter clients are now mature and competitive enough of a market that they should support plug-ins of their own. It's the way things go. They are pretty much plug-ins themselves, but then so is Twitter a plug-in for the Internet, which is the end of the chain (it's not a plug-in for anything).

If Seesmic supported plug-ins then they wouldn't have to wait for their competitors to beat them in the market before they implemented something. They wouldn't have to worry if it pissed off Ev or Biz, they could just shrug it off as something a developer did (whatever it is that pissed them off).

It may be impossible for them to support plug-ins, if so, many apologies. But in case it's not, it could be the way to answer all of Scoble's feature requests. "There's a plug-in for that."

A number of folks have been working determinedly at getting video recording capabilities functioning on the Palm Pre since it's debut. Well, it would seem that the long wait is over. The recently released software is homebrew and a little rough around the edges, but apparently does record 320x480px@30fps. It doesn't take full advantage of the Pre's hardware, but it's a start.

[via IntoMobile]

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As we've discussed here before, the biggest beneficiaries of sports reporting are probably the teams themselves. The more news & analysis that is published about a team, the more relevant they remain in the public eye -- no stories, and the teams risk falling into oblivion. So, it's interesting to see that the hockey team, Los Angeles Kings, has recently hired its own full time reporter to cover the team. Rich Hammond once covered the Kings for the Los Angeles Daily News, and has been given complete autonomy to post commentary and stories on the Kings' web site, kings.nhl.com. Sure, some are wary of how "impartial" this news will be if the reporter is on the Kings' payroll; but really, that contention really plays a bit moot nowadays. In an era where the audience is no longer beholden to a few media outlets, the supposed guise of impartiality is less important, replaced by the more useful quality of transparency and accountability. If Hammond reports with genuine, well thought-out coverage, then his audience will reward him with their trust and readership, regardless of where his paycheck comes from.

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The National Lottery has awarded Bletchley Park -- the site of the invention of modern cryptography and a key piece of computer history -- a £460,500 grant as a start on the £10m worth of desperately needed preservation spending. There's some indication that they'll come up with more money in the future, too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed to see Bletchley saved from ruin, but isn't it kind of ironic that the funding to preserve the institute that demonstrated, once and for all, the power of randomness and the dangers of statistical innumeracy is coming from a state-sponsored scam that preys on innumeracy and bad intuition about randomness? I suspect that Turing and co would have sensibly looked at the lotto and said, "Pssht, I have a higher chance of dying before the balls are drawn than I have of winning the jackpot. No thanks."

The grant, announced today, is worth £460,500 - a fraction of the £10m it will take to convert Bletchley Park into a world-class heritage site but it will allow the trust to draw up a detailed plan and go back for more. Combined with other money coming in, including grants from English Heritage and Milton Keynes Council, it should be enough to save Bletchley's famous out-buildings.

Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, where a team of brilliant mathematicians and linguists decoded messages sent by Hitler to his generals, is scandalously dilapidated. Its wooden walls and roof are literally rotting away. It was in this hut that messages brought in by bike messengers from listening stations all over Britain were decoded into German. They were then passed to Hut 3, for translation and analysis.

Huts used to defeat Nazis rescued by £4m grant (via O'Reilly Radar)

Phaethon360 sends in a piece that looks at how quickly game costs can add up these days, now that DLC, microtransactions and standalone expansions are commonplace, writing, "If you were trying to the think of the most expensive games to play, Rock Band or a monthly fee MMORPG would come to mind. But Halo 3 is right up there, too." It's reminiscent of a recent post at IncGamers where the author tallied up how much he'd spent on World of Warcraft over the past several years, and was astonished to realize it numbered in the thousands of dollars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This creepy leg-waving giant spider prop is based on Village Haunts' Spider-Wiper, which we covered back in 2006. I really like the close-up of the drive mechanism at 0:12 or so. Here's what it looks like with the skin on.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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We've just posted the second part of our blog post about ISO and Sensitivity. Last week we looked at what the ISO standard is supposed to tell us (the key thing being that it's based on JPEG middle gray and therefore is dependent on the manufacturer's chosen tone curve). This week we have a little look at what's going on behind the scenes when many modern cameras try to boost their ability to capture highlights.

We've just posted the second part of our blog post about ISO and Sensitivity. Last week we looked at what the ISO standard is supposed to tell us (the key thing being that it's based on JPEG middle gray and therefore is dependant on the manufacturer's chosen tone curve). This week we have a little look at what's going on behind the scenes when many modern cameras try to boost their ability to capture highlights.

Here's a humongous barrel-type compost rig that can turn up to 500 lbs of a load using pedal-power. All the parts were made from bike drive trains and parts found around the shop. This might be overkill for a household, but might make sense for a small community garden. Definitely you'd get some exercise while you're promoting aerobic decomposition.

Pedal Powered Compost Turner [Thanks, Phil Shapiro!]

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bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that the Pirate Party has opened a branch office in Australia and is recruiting office bearers and supporters. The group updated the Australian website it registered last year and advertised for a president, treasurer, secretary, and supporting positions. A party spokesman, Rodney Serkowski, said the group was close to establishing a beachhead in Australia. He said that with 300 supporters it was on its way to signing the 500 it needed to become an official Australian political party. 'We are currently an online community, working together with the intention of becoming a registered party, and we're coming closer to reaching that goal,' Serkowski said. 'If we can get the required 500 members, and be registered by year's end, I think it is highly probable that we will contest the next Federal election in Australia.' At the weekend about two percent of Germans voted for the Pirate Party, although it needed five percent to gain a seat in the Bundestag."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They aren't a lot of bells & whistles on this DIY logic probe, but it's still useful. It looks like you could make this simple probe for just a couple of bucks. You might even have all the components hiding in a parts bin somewhere.

In the Maker Shed:


DIY Design Electronics Kit

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Reid Rosefelt writes "I thought you might be interested as this is a good example of how someone can make money out of free (or close to it). ... Jeff Scher has had a long and successful career as a painter and an animator/experimental filmmaker.... Recently he was asked to make a short film [once] a month which would run in the Opinion Page of the New York Times. This has changed his life. It's not just that his worldwide audience has grown beyond his wildest dreams; he is reaching a completely different kind of audience -- people who would never have seen his movies in museums and festivals. And although he makes very little money doing them, it has been the best advertising in the world for his paid projects. ... He is getting jobs that he would never have gotten, including one from one of his musical heroes."

The details of this deal are a bit unclear to me, but it sounds like Scher gets free publicity for his work -- and the New York Times gets some interesting content that might help promote its own reputation (and reason to buy). Also, according to Rosefelt, Scher retains ownership of his artwork, but the NYT has an exclusive license to show his work for the first month that it's on the NYT site. While that detail may appear to be a shrewd clause for NYT to help it gain audience, it shouldn't rely too heavily on that exclusivity. The NYT needs to focus on providing interesting and unique content all the time -- and the month-long time limit suggests that someone in the deal might understand that fact. But in any case, this is yet another example of how providing digital content for free can create a viable business for an artist.

In the bigger picture, though, this promotion alone obviously won't budge the NYT's bottomline. However, this deal highlights one of the NYT's strengths: that it can help artists (not just journalists) to connect with a large community -- and an expanded business could be built around that strength. There's an opportunity here for newspapers to reach broader audiences with content (beyond news) that is not a commodity. Experiments like this could point to more newspapers turning to curating unique content and providing more useful services to readers -- services that can't easily be copied.

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An anonymous reader writes "Costis was able to dump the elusive boot ROM from the Gameboy Color by using various voltage and clock glitching tricks. The boot ROM is what initializes the Gameboy hardware, displays the 'GAMEBOY' logo and animation, and makes the trademarked 'cling!' sound effect. Even decapping the CPU had failed previously, but now the boot image and specifics on how it was dumped (along with many photos) are available for download."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Former BB guestblogger and Japan-based blogger Danny Choo has a neat post up with snapshots from Japanese festivals, shot with a Lumix. Above, one of the game/contest stalls alongside one ceremonial observance. "Kingyo Sukui is where folks try to nab as many goldfish as possible from the tub with a single hoop of thin paper."

Another photo in the gallery shows Sesame Street character dolls on display at a festival vendor stall. Danny jokes that Sesame Street looks a li'l different over there. You have to watch the video clip after the jump to appreciate just how different: now, I'm very ignorant about Japanese media culture, but am guessing that this is a spoof on a comedy show or something.

Japanese Festivals (dannychoo.com)

Matt_dk sends word that NASA has chosen a new target crater into which to crash the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission vehicles. "The decision means that when NASA's LCROSS probe and its spent Centaur rocket stage slam into the moon on Oct. 9, they will crash into the large crater Cabeus, and not the nearby (and smaller) Cabeus A crater that was previously targeted. ... The data suggests the new target Cabeus has a concentration of hydrogen — an indication of possible water ice — that's higher than anywhere else at the lunar south pole. ... A small valley etched into the otherwise tall crater ridge of Cabeus should allow sunlight to shine on the ejecta cloud kicked up when LCROSS and its Centaur rocket stage crash into the moon in successive impacts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love the band They Might Be Giants. I love designing 3D objects on the computer. I love turning those designs into real objects. I love this song and video!

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There has been an ongoing legal battle over the past few years about how and when game makers can use the likenesses of football players without their permission. Former college football player Samuel Keller filed a class action suit in May against Electronic Arts for the publisher's use of NCAA players' information — including things like jersey number, height, weight, skin tone and hair style, but not names — to recreate actual teams within sports games. An earlier suit filed by NFL Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown brought up the fact that video games weren't even a consideration when contracts and licensing rights were negotiated in the '50s and '60s, yet many football players from that era (including Brown) are represented in the occasional sports game whether they like it or not. A ruling came down from a district court judge last Wednesday stating that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment," and are thus protected under the First Amendment. Brown and fellow Hall-of-Famer Herb Adderley are now seeking to throw their support behind Keller's lawsuit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're going to give out delicate custom business cards that were made using the aid of some fancy machine, you'd better have the geek cred and 3D printed business card holder to back them up.

More:

• Adafruit's business card makes art!
  
• 3D printed business card holder (another one)
  
• PCB business cards
  
• Business card caliper
  

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The US Trade Rep apparently has a thing on their website called "ask the ambassador" and Robin alerts us that recently a "James from Virginia" asked a rather important question:

"If the United States government gives all other governments in the ACTA negotiation a copy of a text, what is the rationale for keeping this a secret from the American public? Why would a negotiation at ACTA be less transparent than negotiations at World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the World Trade Organization (WTO)?"

The USTR's answer is really a convenient non-answer. It basically says that it can't reveal the details because everybody promised not to do so. Of course, that doesn't explain why so many lobbyists have such detailed access to the info, and why other countries have revealed the details of the negotiations. The answer that "this is how we do things" isn't particularly reassuring when corporations and diplomats are basically negotiating basic civil rights.

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Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amphibious architecture, I TXTed a beaver in the East River, neat... You can too, just text "EastRiver" or "BronxRiver" to 41411

Amphibious Architecture is a visual interface floating on the water’s surface, a veritable looking glass into the aquatic ecosystem. This manufactured point of connection submerges ubiquitous computing into the one element that covers 90% of the Earth’s inhabitable volume and which envelops New York City but remains under-explored and under-engaged.

Installed at two sites along the East and the Bronx Rivers, this project is a network of floating interactive buoys housing a range of sensors below water and an array of light emitting diodes (LEDs) above water. The sensors monitor water quality, the presence of fish, and human interest in the river’s ecosystem, while the lights respond to the sensors, creating feedback loops between humans, fish in their shared environment. Additionally an SMS interface allows homo-citizens to text-message the fish and receive real-time information about the river, contributing towards the collective display of human interest in the aquatic environment. The aim of which is to simultaneously spark a larger public interest and dialogue about our local waterways.

Distinctly moving away from the pervasive ‘do-not-disturb’ approach to urban environmentalism, the project encourages curiosity and engagement. Treating the river water as a reflective surface to mirror our own homo-image and architecture, establishing a two-way interface between the terrestrial and the aquatic. The project thus creates a dynamic and captivating layer of light above the surface of the river, making visible the invisible through real-time mapping of the new ecology of people, marine life, buildings, and public space.

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There's a lot to enjoy in the Flickr stream of Vienna-based graphic designer Michæl Paukner. I intend to start following him on Twitter. I think this piece, above, is my favorite of the 27 he has posted online so far.

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. - A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-- Albert Einstein

Skin Encapsulated Ego (via Fernando Rizo).

There's a lot to enjoy in the Flickr stream of Vienna-based graphic designer Michæl Paukner. I intend to start following him on Twitter. I think this piece, above, is my favorite of the 27 he has posted online so far.

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. - A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-- Albert Einstein

Skin Encapsulated Ego (via Fernando Rizo).

Columnist and conservative speechwriter William Safire died yesterday at age 79. Here is the speech he drafted for president Nixon to read in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong found themselves stranded to die on the moon. I am happy to note that Messrs. Aldrin and Armstrong are all still alive (as is Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues walked on her surface). William Safire's Finest Speech. (Gawker, via Scott Beale)

More bad news for the dollar. The head of the World Bank says the importance of American currency will continue to diminish in relation to the euro and the Chinese renminbi.

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."

New York Times article here.

So many men to choose from!

An anonymous reader recommends a project carried out recently by Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier. Brunier traveled to the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands and to the Chilean desert to capture 1,200 images — each one a 6-minute exposure — of the night sky. The photos were taken between August 2008 and February 2009 and required more than 30 full nights under the stars. Tapissier then processed the images together into a single zoomable, 800-megapixel, 360-degree image of the sky in which the Earth is embedded. "It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations... whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera." The image is the first of three portraits produced by the European Southern Observatory's GigaGalaxy Zoom project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This mechanical tumor by Mio I-zawa is actually a visualizer that shows CPU usage. It's meant to give an indication of the computers 'stress level'. I love the creepy organic aesthetic, but it seems like the tumor should only be monitoring the unwanted parts of your CPU load. Perhaps it could be made to monitor spyware and botnet activity on your computer?

[via pink tentacle]

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Even as the Obama administration is still supporting immunity for the telcos who gave the gov't wiretap info without any warrants, a group of Senators has now introduced legislation that would repeal the immunity. The simplest explanation for this:

"Congress should not have short-circuited the courts' constitutional role in assessing the legality of the program."

Indeed. If the programs were actually legal, then let a court say that. If the programs were illegal, then there is no good reason to have made the telcos immune.

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