WhatDoIKnow sends in a story about an appeals court ruling in a singular case that might have the effect of narrowing "fair use" rights for transformative uses of artworks. "The sculptor who designed the Korean War memorial [in Washington DC] brought suit against the Postal Service after a photograph of his work was used on a postage stamp. Though first ruled protected by 'fair use,' on appeal the court ruled in favor (PDF) of the sculptor, Frank Gaylord, now 85."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on CRAFT we saw:

Articulate Matter - A Sculptural Web Comic

The Making of David Ellison's Tables

Photoshop Cooking

DIY Play Laptop

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reporter writes "New strains of 'Gram-negative' bacteria have become resistant to all safe antibiotics. Though methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the best-known antibiotic-resistant germ, the new class of resistant bacteria could be more dangerous still. 'The bacteria, classified as Gram-negative because of their reaction to the so-called Gram stain test, can cause severe pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream, and other parts of the body. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive organisms like MRSA.' The only antibiotics — colistin and polymyxin B — that still have efficacy against Gram-negative bacteria produce dangerous side effects: kidney damage and nerve damage. Patients who are infected with Gram-negative bacteria must make the unsavory choice between life with kidney damage or death with intact kidneys. Recently, some new strains of Gram-negative bacteria have shown resistance against even colistin and polymyxin B. Infection with these new strains typically means death for the patient."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Images from the McCall Studios website.

Sadly, famed science fiction and space exploration artist, Robert McCall, has died. He passed away on Friday, of a heart attack, in his Scottsdale, Arizona home.

Anybody who's paid even passing attention to sci-fi, the space program, or postage stamp art has seen Bob McCall's work. He painted the images on the 2001: A Space Odyssey poster, painted the amazing space mural at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, and created many of the images found on NASA mission patches. His friend Isaac Asimov once described him as the "nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space."

I remember pouring over his images as a kid and own a well-traveled copy of Vision of the Future, the Ben Bova book dedicated to McCall's work. He will be sorely missed by spacey visionaries everywhere. [Thanks, Rachel!]

Famed space artist Robert McCall, 90, dies

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marpot writes "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rob Weir got wind that a Slovakian tech site had been discussing the non-randomness of Microsoft's intended-to-be-random browser choice screen, which went into effect on European Windows 7 systems last week. He did some testing and found that indeed the order in which the five browser choices appear on the selection screen is far from random — though probably not intentionally slanted. He then proceeds to give Microsoft a lesson in random-shuffle algorithms. "This computational problem has been known since the earliest days of computing. There are 5 well-known approaches: 3 good solutions, 1 acceptable solution that is slower than necessary and 1 bad approach that doesn’t really work. Microsoft appears to have picked the bad approach. But I do not believe there is some nefarious intent to this bug. It is more in the nature of a 'naive algorithm,' like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least 1 of them would make the same mistake. But with education and experience, one learns about these things. And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth. ... The lesson here is that getting randomness on a computer cannot be left to chance. You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Background: The Recycling Designprize

It is an „open" competition which invites all creatives and designers with professional or semi-professional education to submit their works and concepts.

We ask for the design of objects made of "garbage" and/or industrial rests of production. The objects should be made for daily use or for décor. The objects should be planned for production in "smaller" or "bigger" series in the frame of an institution of employment promotion. It is not allowed to use materials which are marked with the "green point" (which is a special german collection system for the packing material of consumer goods).

The aim of the designprize

Via the use of "littered things" (from industry, handicraft), garbage, "residual material", useless things shall become useable. The developed products shall be displayed for sale in institutions of employment promotion and generating so a social usability. The production of "clever", "beautiful" and "useful" objects which award a prize conduce the environment and are a contribution for employment promotion.

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xsee writes "Only hours after the earthquake and resulting tsunami from Chile, hackers began manipulating search results to direct people seeking information on the event to infected webpages. Exercise caution as to where you get information on this tragedy. Chester Wisniewski describes what happened after he saw a suspicious site listed second on a Google search: 'It appears to be a normal website with information and videos about different Asian tsunamis over the past few years. It is difficult to tell whether this particular page was SEO-optimized, or was an innocent victim of a malicious script. SophosLabs got back to me that this page contains some obfuscated malicious JavaScript that we detect as MAL/ObfJS-R. This script was appended after the normal code on the page'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments' most recent, ARM-based series of graphing calculators, the TI-Nspire line, has long resisted users' efforts to run their own software. (Unlike other TI calculator models, which can be programmed either in BASIC, C, or assembly language, the Nspire only supports an extremely limited form of BASIC.) A bug in the Nspire's OS was recently discovered, however, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary machine code. Now the first version of a tool called Ndless has been released, enabling users, for the first time, to write and run their own C and assembly programs on the device. This opens up exciting new possibilities for these devices, which are extremely powerful compared to TI's other calculator offerings, but (thanks to the built-in software's limitations) have hitherto been largely ignored by the calculator programming community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jonverve writes "In May of 2009, the White House launched an Ideascale site to gather ideas from citizens to identify ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.' The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana, solve tax issues and to reinvestigate Obama's birth origins. Fast forward to February 6 and the same process has been repeated with individual federal agencies as the subject. This time the idea generation has been much more productive, with ideas such as establishing clear benchmarks on humanitarian progress in Sudan to the State Department, funding for open source text books and materials to the Department of Education, making it easier to access previously FOIAed documents to the Department of Justice, and creating a Wiki for NASA to share its data and to engage the public. Hackers from NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform have created a site that aggregates 23 of these idea sites to give a quick peek into the best rated contributions in each category. Programmed in Python and using the MongoDB and Tornado web server, the Open Gov Tracker was highlighted by the open government blog Govfresh this past week as well. Jessy Cowan-Sharp, one of the creators, explained their motivation: 'We thought that a single access point would give a sense of the participation on all the different sites, a window into the discussions happening, build some excitement, and inspire people to participate.' The process closes on March 19th, so go and visit the site to contribute your ideas and vote!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today is the last day to take advantage of free shipping in the Maker Shed. So what's the catch? The offer is available on orders of $125 or more, shipped to an address in the continental US. But what about all our overseas friends? No problem, you can save $10 on shipping for orders over $125. Just remember to use coupon code FEBSHIP at checkout.

Need some inspiration? Check out our new MintyBoost bundle, compressed air rocket kits, or transparent breadboards. We are also taking pre-orders of our Make: Electronics Components Pack 1.

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Not sure what's going on, if this is for everyone, or just a few, or just me.

The last update in my timeline is 8 hours old.

But some people are getting updates, because I've gotten replies to some of my messages.

No mention of the problem on status.twitter.com.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has ruled that a Texas teenager was not entitled to invoke the innocent infringement defense in an RIAA file-sharing case where she had admittedly made unauthorized downloads of all of the 16 song files in question, and had not disputed that she had 'access' to the CD versions of the songs which bore copyright notices. The 11-page decision (PDF) handed down in Maverick Recording v. Harper seems to equate 'access' with the mere fact that CDs on sale in stores had copyright notices, and that she was free to go to such stores. In my opinion, however, that is not the type of access contemplated in the statute, as the reference to 'access' in the statute was intended to obviate the 'innocence' defense where the copy reproduced bore a copyright notice. The court also held that the 'making available' issue was irrelevant to the appeal, and that the constitutional argument as to excessiveness of damages had not been preserved for appeal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool:

Check out Dave's excellent prototyping box built from a child's lap desk.

I frequently work on projects in the living room in front of the TV while sitting on the couch soldering away hunched over a disarray of wires, parts, wires, speakers, cords, breadboards, and tools. Whenever I want to work from the couch I have to go into the studio and make 15 trips up and down the stairs, cables, toolbox, parts boxes, soldering iron, etc. It's always a major hassle. Then, when I've finally completed mocking something up on the breadboard and I want to test it I need speakers, headphones, a sound source and I have to connect it all with alligator clips. It's really inefficient and makes me less apt to start a project because all I can think about is the huge mess it's going to make.

Dave's project write-up includes a great description of the build process as well as wiring diagrams. Awesome!

More:

• Arduino prototyping lap desk
• Arduino Project Box
• Cigar box prototyping at Maker Faire RI

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suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from ZDNet about another troubling aspect of the UK's much-maligned Digital Economy Bill: "The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week. This would leave many organizations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access. 'This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in. Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe,' said Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University." Relatedly, an anonymous reader passes along a post which breaks down the question of whether using unprotected Wi-Fi is stealing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

reporter writes "Since 2006, Apple has regularly audited its manufacturing partners to ensure that they conform to Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct (ASCC), which essentially codifies Western ethical standards with regard to the environment, labor, business conduct, etc. Core violations of ASCC 'include abuse, underage employment, involuntary labor, falsification of audit materials, threats to worker safety, intimidation or retaliation against workers in the audit and serious threats to the environment. Apple said it requires facilities it has found to have a core violation to address the situation immediately and institute a system that insures compliance. Additionally, the facility is placed on probation and later re-audited.' Apple checks 102 facilities, most of which are located in Asia, and these facilities employ 133,000 workers. The most recent audit of Apple's partners revealed 17 violations of ASCC. The violations include hiring workers who were as young as 15 years of age, incorrectly disposing of hazardous waste, and falsifying records. In Apple's recently released Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report (PDF), they condemned the violations and threatened to terminate their business with facilities that did not change their ways."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taco Cowboy writes in with a report from The Register about a US policy shift away from keeping hands off the Internet. "According to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, Obama's top official at the Department of Commerce, the US government's policy of leaving the Internet alone is over. Instead, an 'Internet Policy 3.0' approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance." Here is the presentation in which Strickling enunciated these changes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Standing Bear writes "One billion people live in squatter cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. Stewart Brand writes in Prospect Magazine about what squatter cities can teach us about future urban living. 'The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents,' writes Brand. 'Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density — 1M people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai — and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers. 'Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease, and injustice as much as business, innovation, education, and entertainment,' says Brand. Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'" Reader Kanel adds this note of perspective: "Kevin Kelly is another guy who wrote about slums in a very positive light, though he was more interested in self-organisation and why cities are cool, I think. Kelly also reports on the strange trend for slum tourism. What we're seeing here is that the 'slums' have become a vehicle for people to bring out their own ideas about cities, humans, and the universe at large. I have a feeling that we're not really going to learn a lot about slums if we study them through these guys."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've just signed up for Tom Henderson's Math for Primates podcast on the strength of this interview he conducted with Technoccult about his theory of punk mathematics. My dad's a mathematician and I love math, but stopped taking it after first year university calculus and stats and feel like I'm losing it by the year. I like Henderson's approach to the subject! Bonus: Tom helped Jane McGonigal and pals make the awesome Superstruct game.

So, the concept I pitched to Nick was, "Let's talk about math from the platform of 'Math that humans are likely to want to know, because it's about other humans.'" Social conflict. Sex. Beauty.

It gives us an excuse to talk extensively about game theory. And, game theory is a key place to teach humans mathematics, because we seem to have some optimized "cheat detection" in our brains.

Let me give you an example, it's something like, uh...

There are four face-down cards on a table. There is a rule: "If the number showing is even, then the back of the card MUST have a vowel." Now, given an E, 3, 8, D, what is the smallest number of cards you need to flip over to verify that the rule is being followed? Maybe I fucked up the puzzle. But, anyway, the answer as I've phrased it is NOT E and 3.

You need to make sure that 8 has a vowel on the back, and you need to make sure that D does NOT have an even number on the back.

Everyone gets this wrong, basically. Well, non-mathematicians always do, and I'm pretty sure I got it wrong because I get every answer wrong on the first try. Punk as fuck. Now, if you ask the same people a logically equivalent question: "You see four people. Two are drinking beer and two are drinking coke. Whose IDs do you have to check?" No one says you have to check the ID of the coke drinker. Because who cares how old they are? If it's the same puzzle, but phrased as a problem of possible social cheating, we nail it.

The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics - Technoccult interviews Tom Henderson (via Beyond the Beyond)

Dr La writes "Two metal objects, one cylindrical and a smaller round one, crashed near Buren Soum in the Tuv province of Mongolia, in an empty field, on 19 February. They are parts of an American Delta II rocket stage (nr. 35939, 2009-052C) that launched the military STSS Demo 1 & 2 satellites in September 2009. Both articles linked above say that the larger of the two objects is 7.5 meters in diameter, but in this photo it looks more like 7.5 feet. It is marked with the serial number '02728.' (The military STSS program is intended for space-based detection and tracking of missiles.) In the months leading up to the February 19 orbital decay over Mongolia, the fall of the rocket stage was followed by amateur satellite trackers. Based on their final orbit determinations just hours before the decay, the decay must have occurred near 3:32 UTC on February 19."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Super Punch has rounded up a bunch of the best YouTube videos of Kim Jong Il's "traffic girls," who are dressed in snappy uniforms, which they wear as they perform an elaborate, robotic mime-show that directs North Korean traffic. They only turn counter-clockwise. Of course.

Super Punch: North Korean Traffic Girls:Traffic

Loopla's "Gyro-bowl" is a kids' eating-bowl mounted on a gimbals so that it can swing freely as your kid picks it up and moves it around. It looks like it would be a lot of fun -- and easier for kids to carry without spilling.

Loopla (via Make)

GlennF sez, "The Digital Economy Bill in the UK that Cory has written about has a new, horrible portion that could cause many (most?) public hotspots to shut down unless run by companies large enough to handle the recordkeeping requirements. This ZDNet UK article cites legal experts who say that the penalties associated with failure to comply will make small businesses turn off hotspots. Universities and libraries may face huge liability as well."

Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses", and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.

"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."

The Digital Economy Bill is being sold to us on the grounds that copyright infringement harms the British economy because of the importance of our entertainment industry. But while the measures in the DEB won't stop copyright infringement (copying isn't going to slow down -- as computers and the technology they enable gets cheaper and more widely distributed, copying will continue to speed up, just as it has done since the dawn of the computer industry), they will harm British business and British families, by making the Internet generally less useful and more difficult and more expensive for honest people to use.

In other words, the Digital Economy Bill will do no good for the analogue economy industries, and will weaken the digital economy.

Open Wi-Fi 'outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill (Thanks, Glenn!)

theodp writes "Apple's shareholder meeting this week took on a Jerry Springer vibe, with harsh comments about Al Gore, former VP and Apple board member, setting the tone. Several stockholders took turns either bashing or praising Gore's high-profile views on climate change. Apple shareholder Shelton Ehrlich urged against Gore's re-election to the board, claiming that Gore 'has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted. If [the] advice he gives to Apple is as faulty as his views on the environment then he doesn't need to be re-elected.' Hey, at least he moved a few copies of Keynote, Shelton. Shareholders introduced proposals regarding Apple's environmental impact — one asking Apple to commit publicly to greenhouse gas reduction goals and to publish a formal sustainability report; another proposing that Apple's board establish a sustainability committee. These proposals were rejected by shareholders. However, preliminary voting results indicated that Gore was re-elected to Apple's Board."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This product by Löopa is called the "gyro-bowl," in spite of the fact that, since it does not exploit conservation of angular momentum, there's really nothing "gyroscopic" about it. I haven't purchased, used, been given, been paid to endorse, or otherwise had any first-hand experience of this product, but the idea is certainly clever.

[Thanks, Billy Baque!]

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simpz writes "Will the serial port as a console connection ever be displaced — especially for devices such as switches, routers, SAN boxes, etc.? In one sense it's a simple connection. But it is the only current port that, in order to use, you need to know about wiring / baud rates / parity, etc. It has non-standard pinouts. And it is becoming too slow to upload firmware to dead devices, as the firmware updates get larger. Also, the serial port is rapidly disappearing from new laptops — which is where you often really need it, in data centers. Centronics, PS/2, and current loop are mostly defunct. Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'll be helping out Ladyada with another night of "Ask an engineer" - the weekly LIVE video show about electronics and more in NYC - stop by if you're around! She'll be going over some more chapters in the Make: Electronics book!

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Make: Online reader Conor wrote in with a pic of his small, small workshop -- on top of an old traveler's trunk, underneath his loft bed in a 8x8' room! Kind of reminds me of Adam Wolf's closet workshop except with more Mexican candles. And what's that he's working on? An electric guitar slash bullhorn? The neighbors'll like that.

Readers, anyone else have a nifty solution for a space-deprived maker?

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Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum has an article in Slate about the US government's mostly forgotten policy in the 1920s and 1930s of poisoning industrial alcohols manufactured in the US to scare people into giving up illicit drinking during Prohibition. Known as the 'chemist's war of Prohibition,' the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, killed at least 10,000 people between 1926 and 1933. The story begins with ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which banned sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the US. By the mid-1920s, when the government saw that its 'noble experiment' was in danger of failing, it decided that the problem was that readily available methyl (industrial) alcohol — itself a poison — didn't taste nasty enough. The government put its chemists to work designing ever more unpalatable toxins — adding such chemicals as kerosene, brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor to stop the poisoning program. But an official sense of higher purpose kept it in place, while lawmakers opposed to the plan were accused of being in cahoots with criminals and bootleggers. The chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, one of the poisoning program's most outspoken opponents, liked to call it 'our national experiment in extermination.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kamapuaa writes "The NY Times has an article about how real-time license plate scanning is changing the car repo business. MVTRAC is one of several companies providing technology to track car license plates automatically, in order to populate private databases. This new tech is used by car repo companies to help banks or other lenders repossess cars; by police to find stolen cars or to locate ticket scofflaws; or really for whatever application MVTRAC and its competitors feel like pursuing, as the new-found industry lacks any kind of government oversight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader edgeofphysics provides a technical sidelight on the earthquake in Chile this morning — some details on how the European Southern Observatory protects the mirrors of the Very Large Telescope when an earthquake strikes. "Given that Chile is one of the most seismically active countries in the world, how do astronomers protect their giant telescopes that have been built or are being built in the Chilean Andes? This blog post discusses how Chile's most advanced facility protects its priceless 8.2-meter primary mirrors in the event of an earthquake."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, New York received two feet of snow during their latest storm. We were hit a little harder here in Pittsburgh, receiving just a nose more.

Puns aside, this is a pretty funny snow sculpture. My favorite for the season has been the fire-breathing snowman, but I have been too occupied with getting the stuff out of my way to take advantage of it as a building material. Have you built anything fun out of snow this year? [via neatorama]

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mdsolar writes "Following the Vermont Senate's 26-to-4 vote not to approve a 20-year license extension for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the Vermont Public Service Board will consider revoking its operating license as well. Meanwhile, the plant continues to operate without its Director of Nuclear Safety Assurance, who has been placed on administrative leave; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel. It may be that the NRC is not capable of doing what is needed with regard to Entergy, the plant owner, which is also facing prosecution by the Mississippi Attorney General."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is amazing, on Tuesday Roger Ebert will be using his own voice (made from old recordings) while on the Oprah show.

After I lost my speaking voice, everybody thought they had this brilliant idea. "Hey! Why don't you just take your voice from your old shows and put it on a computer?" Sounded good to me. I kept getting suggestions: "I know this guy who says it would be easy." Either there wasn't a guy or he didn't think it would be easy. In the meantime, I was using off-the-shelf computer voices on my laptop. My wife Chaz loved a voice named Lawrence, who had a British accent and sounded like a slightly crabby headmaster. Then I found a new Mac voice named Alex, who sounded like he knew when a sentence had ended. ??One day I was moseying around the Web and found the name of a company in Edinburgh named CereProc. They claimed they could build voices for specific customers. They had demos of the voices of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (I amused myself by having them argue with each other.) In August 2009, I sent an e-mail to Scotland and heard back from Paul Welham, the president of CereProc, and Graham Leary, one of their programming geniuses.??They said they needed good quality audio to work with. Hey, no problem. I'd been doing movie reviews on television since 1975 and had hours and hours of old programs. But it wasn't that simple. They listened to the old shows, and discovered (1) somebody else was always interrupting me, (2) I sounded all worked up a lot of the time, and (3) you could kinda hear the soundtracks of movies playing in the background.

....had an idea. Before I lost my voice due to cancer-related surgery, I'd recorded commentary tracks for some movies on DVD: "Citizen Kane," "Casablanca," "Floating Weeds," "Dark City" and, ah, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." These tracks had been recorded separately from the movies, so they could be edited to fit scenes. They might be "pure" audio. I asked two friends of mine, Ronnie Sass of Warner Bros. and Kim Hendrickson of the Criterion Collection, if they still had the original digital recordings. They rummaged in warehouses and found they did. So did New Line and 20th Century-Fox, studios for which I'd also recorded commentary tracks.

This began a back-and-forth process with CereProc, which had to transcribe every recording with perfect accuracy so they could locate every word. The "normal person" may use 5,000 words, not all of them on the same day. A college professor may use 15,000. Shakespeare used more than 25,000, but he was making up a lot of them as he went along.

Anyway, CereProc didn't need to hear me speaking a specific word in order for my "voice" to say it. They needed lots of words to determine the general idea of how I might say a word. They transcribed and programmed and tweaked and fiddled, and early this February, sent me the files for a beta version of my voice. I played it for Chaz, and she said, yes, she could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said "I."

This was the voice I used in predicting the Oscar winners when Chaz and I taped a segment Friday of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." When it was just me talking with Oprah, I used Alex. That show will air on Tuesday, so you can hear for yourself. Yes, "Roger Jr." needs to be smoother in tone and steadier in pacing, but the little rascal is good. To hear him coming from my own computer made me ridiculously happy.

You can check out the CereVoice demos here.

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Camilo Salas K. from Disorder Magazine in Chile (a very cool publication about music and culture, in the same eclectic/irreverent vein as Boing Boing) writes to us from the capital city of Santiago:

The situation right now is very bad. We are getting news of the most bad places (the south center of Chile) and the news is no good. I am listening about buildings on the floor, hospitals with a lot of people and aftershocks. Every 5 or 10 minutes we feel shakes from the earth. Right now I am experiencing a VERY LONG ONE. The news says there are over one hundred dead people and lot of injuries. I have electric light and internet, i can use my cellphone, with some difficulty, but it works.

In the most damaged areas there is no electricity or water, but you can buy food. The supermarkets are full of people, but they are working. The most difficult thing is that we dont have a lot of information about the most damaged places, but suddenly news appears about huge fires last night and people escaping from one of the prisons.

I was sleeping at 3:30 in the morning with my girlfriend. I live in the 10th floor of a 10 floor building and i woke up with a little shake. Then it was growing in intensity, and growing and growing. I get to the door and stay there. I have a lot of confidence in the strength of the building I live in, because nothing happend in 1985, the year we experienced another bad earthquake, and my building was built in the 70s. Chile has a really good earthquake standard for buildings.

So after 3 minutes or something like that, I walked out to the street and there was no light. Everyone in my building was good, afraid but good. I stayed like 4 hours down there listening to the radio, finding out what was going on.

12 hours later I don't now whats going on with the most damaged areas. The roads are cut, and this Monday was the day everyone is scheduled to go back to school.

Universities and businesses have been closed, a lot of people are on vacation, so the authorities are moving everything to the following week.

In the most damaged areas, there are buildings on the floor, houses constructed with lightweight material destroyed, and hospitals with a lot of damaged people.

I saw a picture of the museum of contemporary art and it is really damaged. The airport is not working and on TV they show that everything was on the floor. All the airplanes are detoured to argentina or peru. The old buildings are damaged, and some of the new ones, but in general, Santiago is okay.

One of the the strange things about this earthquake is that almost 80% of the population felt it. The state of emergency is in 5 regions, from the 5th, the metropolitan, and the more damaged ones, Bio-bio and Maule.

I read there was a tsunami alert and one island was striked by a very big wave, but there is no news about tsunamis on continental Chile.

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A todos los amigos chilenos de Boing Boing, y toda la gente de latinoamerica que tienen familiares y amigos allá, les saludamos y esperamos por lo mejor para ustedes y sus familias.

An 8.8 earthquake struck Chile last night, killing at least 150 people, leaving some half a million people homeless, and setting off tsunami activity that now threaten islands in the Pacific, and coastlines from South America to Canada. Related quake activity has claimed lives and caused structure collapse in Argentina.

Chile sits along the seismologically volatile "Ring of Fire," and has a long history of strong earthquakes. While the force of this quake was some 800 to 1,000 times stronger than the quake that recently struck Haiti, the destruction and loss of life, by early estimates, seems lower—in part, say some, because the country has more wealth, better infrastructure and architectural standards, and is generally well-prepared.

As I publish this blog post, the National Weather Service reports that the waves hitting the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia were smaller than forecast, causing some to believe that the coming impact on Hawaii may be less than initially feared.

A few early resources here, please feel free to share others in the comments:

* Photographs at Boston.com.
* Google: chilepersonfinder.appspot.com
* NOAA's tsunami tracker
* USGS: Surviving a Tsunami - Lessons from Chile, Hawaii & Japan
* USGS: ongoing notifications of aftershocks in Chile. As I publish this post at 11:15am PT, there have already been 50 aftershocks, many of which were over 5.5 in magnitude.
* Once again, Robert Mackey at NYT's The Lede Blog is doing a great job gathering loose ends into must-read blogging.

(some items via @seanbonner, @mgorbis)

Like 23K others, I'm watching a live stream of a Honolulu television station previewing the tsunami that's likely to hit Hawaii in the next couple of hours.

I wondered on Twitter if any of the news orgs are launching helicopters to provide a view of the surge making landfall.

Brian Stelter of the NY Times notes: "we're about to watch a tsunami reach shore live on TV via Hawaii's local stations. Has that ever happened before?"

Tommy Russo is going to stream the tsunami landfall from Paukukalo on Qik.

I started a photo feed that tracks "tsunami" -- there are already 3 pics in the feed.

If you have any info on media coverage of the landfall please post a comment here.

Obviously safety comes first. But it also seems like an opportunity to make some media history.

eggboard writes "Martin Beck, who in 2008 co-wrote a paper describing a way to inject packets into a secured Wi-Fi system, is back with a more extensive exploit. His 'Enhanced TKIP Michael Attacks' still don't allow extraction of a key, and are limited to TKIP (not AES-CCMP) WPA-protected networks. Still, he's figured out how to put in large payloads, and to extract data sent from an access point to a client — all without cracking the network key. The attack requires proximity to sniff and inject data, but it's another crack in the older key standard (TKIP) that no one with serious security interests should still be using." Here is Beck's paper (PDF) describing the new attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you haven't heard of 20x200, they're site that sells art prints in editions of 200 for 20 bucks each. One of their latest ones (oddly priced at $50 each with 500 printed... they should launch a sister site!) looks awesome and has a fun maker twist, created by Clifton Burt.

In April of 2007, John Maeda quietly posted a haiku he had written to his blog. It was entitled think-make-think, and to me it fulfilled the potential of Maeda's simplicity. Over the next few months, that haiku often found its way to the forefront of my mind. When our studio acquired the remnants of a discarded arrow sign, it was clear to me that think-make-think was a perfect fit, both in form and function.

Buy the print on 20x200.

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Last month, we discussed news that President Obama's 2011 budget proposal did not include plans to continue NASA's Constellation program, choosing instead to focus on establishing a stronger foundation for low earth orbit operations. Unfortunately, as government officials prepare to shut down Constellation, they're warning that it won't be a quick or simple process due to the contracts involved. From the Orlando Sentinel: "Obama's 2011 budget proposal provides $2.5 billion to pay contractors whatever NASA owes them so the agency can stop work on Constellation's Ares rockets, Orion capsule and Altair lunar lander. But administration officials acknowledge that this number is, at best, an educated guess. ... Many inside and outside of the space agency, however, think the number is too low. The agency has signed more than $10 billion worth of contracts to design, test and build the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule that were the heart of Constellation. But government auditors said last year that the costs of some of those contracts had swelled by $3 billion since 2007 because of design changes, technical problems and schedule slips. How much NASA will owe on all those contracts if the plug gets pulled is unclear. Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions — and price — had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start. That means the agency will need to negotiate a buyout with the contractor — and that can be a long and painful process, according to government officials familiar with the cancellation process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Why, they must spit two or three gallons a day!  They ain't died fast enough, these old men!"--Mrs. T.E. Bagley, Whitney, Texas, 1949

John Ptak comments on a story from a 1949 issue of LIFE. The photos are fantastic.

It isn't, I guess, so much a story about their sitting as it is a story about their not sitting, about how it came to be that their lumber was removed and the men forced to find another place to take in the sights and construct their great edifices of commentary and asides.

The story appears in LIFE Magazine of 15 August 1949, and lays the whole drama out in two splash pages, with bare editorializing and some great photos.

The story goes like this: "In 1922 D. (Doctor Dee) Scarborough, the druggist in Whitney, Texas, put up a bench outside his store, and immediately it became a loafing headquarters for the gaffers of the Brazos River Valley. 'Year after year they sat there looking like a jury of irritable terrapins, whittling, spitting and passing judgment on everything that passed. But finally reform caught up with them." It caught up to them, even if everyone was wearing a collared shirt.

The Great Battle of Sitting and Spitting: Whitney, Texas, 1949

A few weeks ago, the Pasadena Playhouse, a historic theater just outside of Los Angeles, announced that it's totally out of cash and shutting its doors. The news was a blow to the L.A. theater world, as the Playhouse has nearly a 100-year history of great performances and arts education. It was especially bad news for the Furious Theatre Company, the Pasadena Playhouse's current company-in-residence, known for its challenging, intense, controversial, and critically-acclaimed productions. It was also bad news personally, as my brother Robert Pescovitz had been deep in rehearsals with the rest of the Furious ensemble for their latest production, a contemporary black comedy about government/corporate conspiracy titled Men of Tortuga, by Jason Wells. The show was supposed to open last weekend, and suddenly Furious found itself scrambling for a new space. At the eleventh hour though, Furious managed to secure the Pasadena Playhouse for one more month to stage this play. The rescheduled opening night is tomorrow, Saturday, February 26. I haven't seen Men of Tortuga yet, but it sounds like a terrific piss take on corporate politics and shady power brokers. The show runs until March 28.

Three power-brokers scheme with a weapons specialist to assassinate a despised opponent... Too bad they’re all such incompetents. The bungling only gets worse as Maxwell, the senior power-broker, takes a young idealist under his wing. Suddenly his long-dormant conscience begins to reawaken. This comedic thriller discloses a sharp parable that takes a crack at the nastiness of covert governmental and corporate operations.

Furious Theatre Company: Men of Tortuga

UPDATE: Furious Theatre Company has kindly offered Boing Boing readers a $10 discount on tickets. When purchasing tickets online, just enter the code: boingboing

spidweb writes "Much virtual ink has been spilled over Ubisoft's new, harsh DRM system for Assassin's Creed 2. You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money. As such it is, if nothing else, a fascinating experiment. From the article: 'Assassin's Creed 2 is different in a key way. Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you get when you combine Mr. Wizard, Harpo Marx and "Adventures with Bill"? I'm not sure exactly, but the exploits of Dr. Ernest Otherford get pretty close.

In this segment, the good Dr. Otherford explores the power of static electricity.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user johnwilson1969 via CC

My friend Gareth Branwyn, chief blogster at Makezine.com, had a picture of himself drawn as a robot that I thought was pretty cool. Investigating that idea led me to the befunky.com website. Tons of interesting ways to rendering your portrait without having to know or have Photoshop. The interface is easy too. Impessive!

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that an independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world's top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report that included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, although there is no scientific consensus to that effect. That brief citation — drawn from a magazine interview with a glaciologist who says he was misquoted — and sporadic criticism of the panel's leader have fueled skepticism in some quarters about the science underlying climate change. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, said the review body would be made up of 'senior scientific figures' who could perhaps produce a report by late summer for consideration at a meeting of the climate panel in October in South Korea. 'I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue,' says Nuttall. One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports. Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals, is crucial to seeking a complete picture of the state of climate science."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "After the DOJ launched an investigation last fall into price fixing by major optical disk drive manufacturers, a home electronics retail store filed a class-action lawsuit this week seeking triple damages for what it is claiming to be long-standing collusion between Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Hitachi to raise and fix prices on the drives. The suit claims the vendors used trade organization forums as meeting places to discuss the price fixing. 'These are big Asian smoke-stack industries where they're investing in big fabrication plants. You can't have a technology destroy the business,' said the attorney representing the plaintiff. 'If you fire up a big fab plant with CRT tubes, and the next generation technology destroys it, then you have a big fab plant manufacturing buggy whips. So they have to make sure the price points for these [newer] technologies ... don't destroy existing markets.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After some investigative hacking, Wil Lindsay added Monome functionality to a low cost Bliptronic 5000 melody generator using an Arduino + Arduinome source code. If the devices mentioned in the previous sentences leave you a tad confused, suffice it to say - the above-demonstrated hack adds nicey-nice versatile functionality to a $50 grid of LED buttons. For more info on how it's done, check out the Arduino sketch and relevant hardware hookup infos @ Stray Technologies. [via Matrixsynth]

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distantbody writes "The flight sim project FlightGear has reached version 2.0. From the website: 'Highlights of this new version include: Dramatic new 3D clouds, dramatic lighting conditions, improved support for custom scenery, and many many new and detailed aircraft models.' Full list of improvements here. And of course the screenshots. The release coincides with the release of SimGear v2, the 'set of open-source libraries designed to be used as building blocks for quickly assembling 3d simulations, games, and visualization applications' on which FlightGear is based."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bitserf writes from New Zealand: "Our overlords in government have decided to try and push through some file sharing legislation. In the bill remains the controversial provisions for three-strikes removal of internet access, though interestingly, nothing prohibiting users from moving to other ISPs. Text of the bill can be found here. Interesting timing, considering ACTA negotiations due to be held in Wellington in April."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "If your handset doesn't get you out and about, tramping through mud, climbing around and hunting for hidden treasure, then something needs an upgrade. The iPhone, Blackberry's Storm and Bold lines, and many Symbian and Android handsets now sport GPS, which makes your smartphone the ticket to join a global movement of outdoor games. These are outbound challenges that pit teams and solo players against themselves and each other in the search for hidden treasure, undiscovered landmarks and hidden spots all over the world. This article delves into several of the best smartphone-friendly real-world games, each of which is a bridge between the online and offline worlds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC After-School Specials hit their zenith (or nadir) with The Day My Kid Went Punk, a punksploitation show to rival the CHiPS "Rip and Destroy" episode (and yes, that's Bernie Kopell, the doctor from the Love Boat, as the outraged dad).

The Day My Kid Went PUNK

Jason sez, "Six photos of me, Jason, under the 'Jason' sign at Epcot's The Living Seas attraction taken over the years 1989-2005. See me start as a gorky 15 year old in short shorts, pass through the fanny pack years of the 90s, and move on to become the grizzled, bearded sysadmin I am today." There is a well-brought-up man indeed! I have a similar series of pics of me with the Haunted Mansion sign that I keep meaning to post.

Jason at The Living Seas (Thanks, Jason!)

Steve Silberman sez, "Holy Terry Gilliam prototype: The original, trippy 1933 film version of Alice in Wonderland by Norman 'Monkey Business' McLeod, starring Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and W.C. Fields, now on DVD with a rave from Alice: 'A revolution in cinema history!'"

But only one can boast the endorsement of the original Alice: the 1933 Paramount "Alice in Wonderland," being released to DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment ($19.98, not rated), the current rights holder. In a Jan. 7, 1934, article in The New York Times, Alice Liddell, quoted under her married name, Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, expressed admiration for the film that Hollywood had wrought from the story Carroll had invented for her some seven decades before.

"I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted," she declared, her words possibly burnished by a Paramount publicist. " 'Alice' is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!"

Another Trippy Rabbit Hole

Alice in Wonderland (1933)

(Thanks, Steve!)

Oh, this is very good news: the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie will be based on Tim Powers's kick-ass, World-Fantasy-Award-winning novel On Stranger Tides, the greatest undead pirate story of all time. Go, Tim! Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. (Thanks, Rob!)

An anonymous reader writes with this interesting bit of speculation: "NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When we talk about the various new business models that work well for content creators, one of the complaints that some of our regular critics have pointed out is that if most of the people are getting the content for free, and only a small group of superfans are paying, aren't those who pay getting "ripped off" somehow -- leading to them eventually jumping on the free-rider bandwagon and leaving no one to pay? Reader JJ sent over a well-articulated version of this argument by a self-described cynical musician in a Polish hard rock band. He describes this as: The Hunt For The Big Dope.

Tragically, this is a total misunderstanding of the economic arguments people make. In fact, it's a gross distortion of the argument to make it easy to dismiss, rather than taking the time to understand it. In fact, what we're really arguing is the opposite of finding the big dope. It's about using content to create fewer dopes, replacing them with people who are willingly buying something of value that they actually want. It's the old system that was focused on getting big dopes to pay for things they didn't need or want. The new business models that we talk about -- focused on giving people a reason to buy -- are about just that: offering scarce value, above and beyond the content, that is worth buying -- and that helps fund the content creation. There's no big dope in this scenario, because the people who are buying get a lot more than just the content, and they're thrilled with the transaction. Everyone comes out of the transaction better off.

If you believe in the "big dope" theory put forth by this guy, then anyone who buys a car is a "big dope," because they're financing all of those commercials, which they get to see on TV without paying for them. The percentage of people who buy a car that they saw in a TV commercial compared to the number of people who actually see the commercial is a tiny, tiny number. But does that make those buyers "big dopes?" Of course not. They got something they wanted (a car). Yes, that's a more extreme example, but when you recognize that the content is acting as an advertisement for the bigger reasons to buy, making them more valuable, the analogy fits perfectly. A large percentage of people will never buy products they find out about via an advertisement. But some do. And if enough do, and the product they're driven to buy is scarce and valuable enough, the company makes money. Same thing for content creators.

They're not looking for "big dopes." They're looking for people who want to make an informed decision, in which they get something of additional scarce value, well beyond the content. That sure beats the old system, which appeared to be focused on hiding the content to force a bunch of dopes to pay without knowing what they'd get -- leading them to be disappointed all too often. No offense to this particular musician, but I'd rather have the system I describe, with no dopes at all, than the old one he appears to pine for, in which all your fans are considered dopes.

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CWmike writes "A federal judge has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the 'downgrade' rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. The order put an end to the lawsuit filed by Emma Alvarado in February 2009. In her original complaint, she accused Microsoft of coercing computer makers into forcing consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista, or later, Windows 7, before they were allowed to downgrade to XP. The judge rejected Alvarado's accusations, saying that the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photos of the prototypes of the Make: Electronics Components Packs. Our art department is still working on lovely sticker art for the cases. Each will also come with a cool Maker Shed Electronics Cheat Sheet (with resistor code values, etc).

 

They've been months in the making, in fact, the robo-elves in the Shed are still putting their greasy little end-effectors on the finishing touches, but I wanted to show 'em off to you anyway. It's the Make: Electronics Components Pack 1 and Components Pack 2, almost everything you need to build the projects from Chapter 1-4 of our tech bestseller Make: Electronics (e.g. sorry but we don't provide the lemons for the lemon battery experiment -- but don't think we didn't consider it!). In fact, we carefully considered everything that goes into these kits, and what they go into -- nice, sturdy compartmented plastic storage cases.

Pack 1 has over 200 components, Pack 2, over 100. And because nearly all of the projects are breadboarded, when you're done doing the experiments in the book, you'll still have nearly 300 components and two cases to get you off and running in your newfound electronics hobby. We say nearly 300, because some of the parts are intentionally harmed in the conducting of these experiments. But not to worry, none of the expensive ones. What are a few fried resistors amongst friends?

Component Pack 1 sells for $99.95 and is available for pre-order now and will be available mid-March. You can sign up to be alerted to Component Pack 2's availability and price. It too should be available mid-month.

Wanna get free shipping on the Component Pack 1? The Shed currently has a deal. Until the end of February, get free shipping on all orders over $125! Just enter coupon code FEBSHIP to your cart prior to checkout. Prior to entering the code, make sure your cart totals at least $125; free shipping will then be pre-selected from the drop-down shipping option.

And don't forget, Maker Shed also offers the Deluxe Toolkit, which includes the tools you need for the book (and getting started in electronics in general), a copy of Make: Electronics itself, and the newest edition of our popular Maker's Notebook.

In the Maker Shed:

Deluxe Make: Electronics Toolkit
Our Price: $124.99
Do you want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Not sure where to start, or what tools you might need? We've taken care of all the questions with our deluxe tool kit from the Maker Shed, featuring our best-selling book, Make: Electronics.

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An anonymous reader writes "Less than one second Linux boot! This video shows an OMAP3530 capturing video data from a camera and rendering it to an LCD display — the video appears on the LCD display in less than a second from reset."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years we've tried to explain the difference between ideas and execution, and how lots of people have ideas (in fact, many have the same ideas entirely independently), but without good execution, those ideas aren't really worth much at all. This point comes up a lot in the debates we have over the patent system -- with patent system supporters often overvaluing the idea part, and grossly underestimating the importance of execution. Often this is because they've never built a real business, and don't realize how little an initial idea plays into the final product. The two are often oceans apart. But stopping others from executing well (or forcing them to fork over a ton of money) just because they executed well where you did not? That doesn't seem like encouraging innovation or promoting progress at all.

DSchneider points us to an excellent recent Jeff Attwood post about the differences between the idea and the execution. It's well worth reading as it covers a bunch of different things, including a common refrain made against those who successfully execute: that they were only able to do so because they were "well-connected." As he notes, being well connected may get you an initial head start, but if you can't execute well, no one will come back. The idea, alone, is almost meaningless.

Attwood highlights this by pointing to a recent letter to a mailing list from one of the guys who started a crowdfunding operation called Fundable a while back, which failed miserably (and very spectacularly in public, with an open letter posted to its website laying out all the dirty laundry). There were all sorts of problems with the execution, which the guy even admits:

Yes, Fundable had some technical and customer service problems. That's because we had no money to revise it. I had plans to scrap the entire CMS and start from scratch with a new design. We were just so burned out that motivation was hard to come by. What was the point if we weren't making enough money to live on after 4 years?

The "technical and customer service problems" underplayed how significant some of those problems were. And yet... now that other crowdfunding platforms are getting attention, such as Kickstarter, this guy is crazy upset that they "stole his idea."

I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook's fund to stimulate development of new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't have to take any risks....

I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face. If you have never started your own company and then had someone else steal the credit for what you worked hard to develop, you don't understand.

Now, I have started my own company, and I've had lots of other people either come up with the same idea separately, or even blatantly decide to do something similar to various aspects of our business. So I do know how it feels. And, certainly when you first hear about it, it may be annoying, but it's really just a challenge. I'll be honest, there are times when others have done a better job executing on ideas than I have in the past, and in the end you either compete, or you tip your hat and move on. Competition breeds innovation and better execution since you know you need to do more. And that means not screwing up your technology and customer service and not lashing out and blaming others when someone else executes better.

And, the thing is, given what we write about, and all the business model examples we've see over the years, we're pretty damn familiar with many of the players in the whole "crowdfunding space." There have been lots of players who have come and gone, and there are at least a dozen players in the space today. And it's not because they all "took" the idea from this guy, but because lots of people recognized that it's an idea that makes sense. Kickstarter is certainly getting a ton of press these days, but that's mostly because of some top notch execution on its part.

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Vik Olliver put up a great tutorial about how you can successfully drill down the middle of a shaft using a standard drill press and cheap vice. To do this, you drill the part backwards, by putting the drill bit in the vice and the part in the drill press chuck. The trick is that you can line up the vice precisely by placing the drill bit into the chuck upside down, lowering the tool, then using it to align and clamp down the vice. Once the vice is secured, you release the drill bit from the chuck (but not the vice), and put the part in the chuck. Of course, a lathe might be preferable, but sometimes you have to work with the tools you have! [via Hack a Day]

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You may recall a few years back that a teenager, Whitney Harper, who was getting sued by the record labels/RIAA for file sharing, claimed that the amount she should have to pay up should be less than the $750 statutory minimum, because she was an "innocent infringer," unaware that what she was doing in listening to music was against the law. In fact, she didn't even realize she was sharing files, but thought she was just listening to music, like radio. Surprisingly, the lower court actually agreed with her and said that $200 per song (for the 37 songs) was an appropriate amount. But, of course, the RIAA appealed, as (despite claims to the contrary in the Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rasset case) they need those huge potential amounts to use as a sledge hammer against file sharers. Unfortunately, an appeals court has overturned the lower court ruling, and said that the statutory minimum of $750 per infringement should apply -- saying that the innocent infringement defense isn't applicable because the CDs the music came on (which she never saw) had proper copyright notices.

As you may know, copyright law does allow for reduced statutory damages on innocent infringement, "where the infringer sustains the burden of proving . . . that [she] was not aware and had no reason to believe that . . . her acts constituted an infringement of copyright." Given the details of this case, that seemed to apply -- but the appeals court was having none of it. In the decision, it argues that the law says an innocent infringer defense cannot be applied (with one exception irrelevant to this case) if a proper copyright notice "appears on the published . . . phonorecords to which a defendant . . . had access."

The court the says that because copyright notices are found regularly on CDs, then Harper effectively "had access" to those recordings, at least enough to know they were covered by copyright. Not surprisingly, I find this argument to be quite troubling. If we assume it is accurate that Harper was using LimeWire as if it were a radio to listen to music, then how would she know that she was violating the copyright on the recordings at all? Would someone listening to the radio know? What about someone listening to Pandora or Spotify. Based on this ruling, anyone can be put at risk of much larger statutory damages for copyright if they simply don't know if the online streaming service they're using has properly cleared the copyrights. That does not seem like a conclusion that makes sense, or would have been intended by Congress. Did Congress really intend for each user to do the research before using any online music service to make sure those services had properly cleared the copyrights?

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Michael Scott points us to the news that a French court has ruled that an IP address is not enough to identify a single individual. Now, obviously, many of us agree with this general point, and we've brought that up time and time again in the past when lawsuits insisted that a single IP address was enough to identify a user. And, given that France now has its three strikes law which will be based in large part on entertainment companies indicating a single IP address as evidence of infringement, this might seem like a good ruling. But in this case, there's another side to it which is important. The reason why the court ruled that an IP address doesn't identify an individual, is to say that it is not a privacy violation to get someone's IP address.

This isn't a new issue. We discussed a similar case before, and I actually think, on the whole, it's correct. An IP address shouldn't be considered private information directly, since it doesn't identify a individual and you effectively have to give it out just to use the internet. But for people who argue that revealing IP addresses is a violation of confidential information, they might not like this ruling very much. On the whole, though, I think in the long run it's better to have a world where the courts recognize that an IP address does not identify a user, even if it means that IP addresses aren't considered private info.

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Sexy Librarians is just one of several fantastic embroidery patterns made by Sublime ? Stitching and for sale in the Boing Boing Bazaar. There's also Meaty Treats, Vital Organs, and Lucha Libre. Check them all out here. And check out the rest of the Makers Market for more maker-made marvelousness.

Sublime ? Stitching

I'm not sure what's going on here but it appears to be an ode to space elevators. The uploader's YouTube channel also has similar videos saluting the Pioneer and Voyager space probes as well as one talking about terraforming Mars. [via the Space Elevator blog]

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PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall, back before The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, a story came out about how the lead police investigator in the case just happened to take a job at Warner Bros. movie studio while The Pirate Bay investigation was still ongoing. This, obviously lead to quite reasonable questions of conflicts of interest, and even corruption. It's hard to see how anyone could justify a police investigator agreeing to a job with a party in a lawsuit that he was currently investigating. But, for whatever reason, the police decided to protect one of their own, and saw no reason for an investigation.

The job at Warner Bros. only lasted (as originally intended) for six months, and then the guy, Jim Keyzer, went back to work for the police. TorrentFreak is reporting that he's now in charge of the IT crime unit, which has the mandate to investigate file-sharing cases.

At the very least, this raises extremely serious conflict of interest questions. The guy was involved in an investigation, hired for a "temporary" job by one of the parties in that investigation -- and then after the job is over, he goes back to work for the police on other investigations that will almost certainly involve the company he took money from for six months. I can understand people taking jobs back and forth between the public and private sector, but the timing of all this seems very suspect, and it seems like the Swedish police should at least set things up so that the conflict of interest is removed, and someone else is in charge of such investigations for the time being.

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I'll be attending a screening of the much-tweeted horrorschlock instaclassic Birdemic tomorrow night in LA, hosted by Tim & Eric ("Season Cinco" of their show debuts Sunday night, and also promises to be great).

Directed by James Nguyen, Birdemic is sort of The Birds meets The Room. Richard Metzger has a comprehensive post about Birdemic over at the LA Times "Brand X" blog. LA folks: The Saturday night Cinefamily screening of Birdemic is sold out, but they've added a second one for March 5. And LOL and behold: Birdemic's on Twitter.

NotAnIndividual writes "On an ice fishing trip two months ago, I lost my iPhone somewhere in the snow. I searched and searched, but to no avail. But just this weekend when moving the ice hut, lo and behold there it was. I quickly threw it into a bag of rice and placed it under a lamp to defrost. Three hours later I plugged it in. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, it had been frozen in snow for the last two months! To my surprise, the Apple logo popped up. I put in the SIM card and voila, my iPhone was back. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back. And this is the same iPhone that I dropped in a cup of coffee a few months ago! This got me wondering how much damage a cell phone can actually take. How have other Slashdot users punished their phones without actually killing them completely?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tofu Wrestling. Feel free to be outraged, disgusted, or turned on. (NSFW, via Brooklyn Vegan.)

Illustration for "The Many Arms of Promotion," by Alicia Traveria for Venuszine.

Our pal, Jenny Hart, of Austin's Sublime Stitching, has a monthly column called "Crafting a Business" over on Venuszine. There's a lot of information here applicable to any type of crafting/making business.

It seems to me that somewhere between working average day jobs and having your own successful business, there would be a scary transition. How did you handle that? Any tips for crafty women who would like to do the same but who don't have the courage?

You bet it was scary. Lost sleep, constant worrying, and seemingly endless work at two jobs: my day job and my dream job. It still is scary. But the scary part is different now. Attempts at making bigger strides, having more demand than resources to meet those demands, managing money wisely, and trying to find financial backing and business people in the industry who get the DIY movement (psst ... they don't) to possibly partner with. I've often felt very much like running a successful business is discovering the emperor has no clothes. Only, you're king at your own company, which means you're the one feeling naked.

From: Starting a small business is all about being innovative and savvy and learning from mistakes

What professional advisers should a small-business person hook up with at the beginning?

Every business will eventually need a lawyer and an accountant, but small businesses can often do without either for a while. A lot will depend on the kind of business you're running. If you need to incorporate right off the bat or have copyright, trademark, and/or patent concerns, then you'll want a lawyer right away. Even small service firms are wise to have a lawyer available for assistance with wording contracts, partnership agreements, and so on, though you can get a long way on the advice of books, small-business resource centers (many states have government-funded programs to help entrepreneurs with basic contract templates and such), and the occasional e-mail or phone call to a lawyer just to make sure your T's are crossed and your I's dotted. As for accounting help, if you're like us and start out as a partnership (the equivalent of an LLP in the U.S.), you can probably get away with just having a bookkeeper (which is a lot cheaper than an accountant), but if and when you incorporate, you'll need an accountant for sure.

From: Knowing how and when to hire a good adviser

You can read all of her columns to date here.

More:

• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks, part 3
• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks, part 2
• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks
• Exploring the business of making
• Maker Business: Venturing out...

Ultimate Embroidery Kit $30.00
Have you learned how to embroider yet? This kit will teach you how to get started even if you've never held a needle and thread. Unique, quality supplies all in one tidy package that will have you set for stitching not just one, but hundreds of possible projects. Even better: your kit will be lovingly hand-assembled for you in Austin, Texas.

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Holy crap, this video truly is the most awesome thing ever!!11one!11. I know nothing about this, other than what's on the YouTube description: "Promo for Giorgio Moroder taken from a Casablanca Records promo tape." I was talking with Joel Johnson about how creepy Moroder seemed in this video, with the pervo-stache and the cocaine shades. "But he mades the trains boogie on time," says Joel. Mr. Moroder is still very much with us, btw: he is 69 years old, and actively composing. Here's his website.

When you're done watching, go listen to this (or buy it). I think it's my favorite Moroder track.

(via Q-Burns Abstract Message via DailySwarm via Mixhell)

Having already been told by a German court that it needs to magically know what songs infringe and which do not, file storage locker site RapidShare was already facing some difficult legal issues in that country. And now that company faces another problem. It's been ordered by a German court to figure out a way to proactively block the upload of 148 titles. Of course, the company can try to do some fingerprinting, but there are always ways around things like that -- and that creates a huge problem for RapidShare. Because if one of its users figures out how to upload one of these books, RapidShare takes the blame -- in the form of $339,000 fine and 2 years of jailtime for execs for each instance that a forbidden work gets through. In what world does it make sense to hold the execs of a company criminally liable for something done by the users of the site?

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roh2cool writes "If you are a watch freak and also happen to be a fan of ultra rare (and expensive) gadgets, this might just interest you. The LG GD910 watch phone looks like a normal watch – except for the fact that it can double up as your mobile phone when needed. 'It is quite thin at just 13.9mm and packs in 3G and Video Calling capabilities as well. The phone is quite stylish and the front fascia is covered by scratch-proof tempered glass. It comes with a Bluetooth headset so you don’t have to keep talking like David Hasselhoff talked to his super-car KITT in the “Knight Rider” series.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One favorite quote from Hunter S. Thompson, who died exactly five years ago (give or take a few days) ago, is this one, the opening lines from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive. Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming: Holy Jesus. What are these goddamn animals?

Thompson and his lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta visited Las Vegas in 1971 to cover the Mint 400 race for Sports Illustrated. But the article they wrote was about far more than that.

Las Vegas Review reporter Corey Levitan writes an article in which he tries to figure out what was real and what wasn't, which as might be imagined when dealing with Thompson seems like a tough thing to figure.

We were a bit concerned last year when the FCC held hearings which were technically about the national broadband policy, but instead focused on copyright, something that is clearly well outside the FCC's mandate -- something the FCC already got in trouble for a few years back with its attempt to mandate a "broadcast flag." However, there are now some additional concerns that this administration is ignoring the limits of the FCC's mandate. As you may recall, a few weeks back, the Justice Department -- at the urging of the entertainment industry -- set up a special IP task force to deal with "the rise of intellectual property crime." However, some are quite worried about how this task force intends to go about this.

Copycense points us to a letter sent to the Justice Department by the Center for Democracy and Technology, which noticed that, in the announcement of this new task force, the Justice Department said it intends to work with the FCC on intellectual property enforcement. That's a problem:

What's wrong with that? It's an invitation to major mission creep. The FCC's job is to execute and enforce federal communications law. It has no authority and no role in enforcing other laws. Lots of unlawful activity -- from intellectual property infringement to racketeering to securities fraud to deceptive advertising -- may occur over or using communications networks. But that doesn't make it the FCC's job to police such activity. The FCC's focus is, and should remain, promoting the availability of high quality communications capabilities in the United States -- not policing what users do with those capabilities.

In addition, the only reason to involve the FCC would be to force the entities the FCC regulates -- communications providers, and in particular ISPs -- to start actively policing I.P. infringement. Having government force ISPs to take on this new role should raise serious red flags. The idea that ISPs don't serve as gatekeepers or content censors, and aren't themselves responsible for what users do on the network, has been a bedrock principle that underpins the Internet's open and innovative nature. Casting it aside would be a serious mistake and a radical departure from U.S. communications policy.

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Ben Wilson Design did this awesome F1 race car model entirely out of red Puma shoe boxes (for a Puma promotion). [via DudeCraft]

PUMA F1 CAR-D

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Predictably Irrational author Dan Ariely used to enjoy taking Airborne, until he read reports that it didn't prevent colds. Before he read the reports, he was "97.5% sure" Airborne didn't work, but that tiny bit of doubt was enough for the placebo effect kick in. The news reports killed the placebo effect. He was sad that he didn't have a cold placebo to depend on, but his mother recently sent him a new nostrum and he is happy again. (I think it is Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic "medicine.").

Dan Ariely: Got My Placebo Back

In 1995, astronomer, amateur hacker tracker and Klein-bottle maker Clifford Stoll wrote an essay (and a book, too, but I haven't read that) explaining why this Internet thing will never work. His main argument seems to be, "Hardware and software will all top out in the mid-90s and, thus, the Internet will never ever get any more user friendly or portable. Also, it is different and scary." Hilarity ensues.

The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works ...

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later." ....

Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet-which there isn't-the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Why the Internet Will Fail, essay reprinted from Newsweek

Via Unlikely Words

Physicist Sean Carroll has built up a bit of a name for himself by tackling one of the age old questions that no one has been able to fully explain: What is time? Earlier this month he gave an interview with Wired where he tried to explain his theories in layman's terms. "I’m trying to understand how time works. And that’s a huge question that has lots of different aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr user fotogra4er replaced the fluorescent tubes lighting his aquarium with LEDs. Which, of course, make way more light and way less heat for the same amount of energy. Then he upped the ante by cooling the LED lighting bank with circulated tank water, exploiting what waste heat the LEDs do generate to warm it, and thus saving even more power that would otherwise go to the tank heater.

[via Hack a Day]

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A concise list of every landing mankind has ever made on other planetary bodies. Have to say, I did not know that the USSR had sent that many probes to Venus. (Via Betsy Mason)

MojoKid writes "Hard drive capacities are sometimes broken down by the number of platters and the size of each. The first 1TB drives, for example, used five 200GB platters; current-generation 1TB drives use two 500GB platters. These values, however, only refer to the accessible storage capacity, not the total size of the platter itself. Invisible to the end-user, additional capacity is used to store positional information and for ECC. The latest Advanced Format hard drive technology changes a hard drive's sector size from 512 bytes to 4096K. This allows the ECC data to be stored more efficiently. Advanced Format drives emulate a 512 byte sector size, to keep backwards compatibility intact, by mapping eight logical 512 byte sectors to a single physical sector. Unfortunately, this creates a problem for Windows XP users. The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem and this quick overview at HotHardware offers some insight into the technology and how it performs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember how the last Guns 'N Roses album leaked to the internet -- and somehow the FBI thought it was a good use of their resources to get involved and arrest the guy who uploaded the files -- leading to him pleading guilty and getting two month's house arrest? Would you believe there's another approach?

Jeff Barr points us to the news that Vince Neil, the "sometimes lead vocalist for Motley Crue," has a new single out -- which first leaked to the internet. But rather than freak out about it, Neil decided to offer it up directly himself for free, and to make it more valuable to get it directly, by offering the track, the video for it and a desktop wallpaper in the official version. And with that announcement, he also reminded folks that the full album will be out later this year, and he hopes they're looking forward to it.

Which response do you think endears more fans? Which response makes a stronger bond between the musician and the fans? Which response is likely to make more people feel good about paying for stuff from an artist? Now, Vince Neil isn't as well known as Guns 'N Roses -- so it's not a direct comparison. But, it does offer a decent way to look at how different musicians handle similar situations.

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Vectorial Elevation is a telerobotic art installation in Vancouver, Canada that enables you to aim 20 searchlights around the English Bay via the Web. Four cameras around the city then photograph your design and the system creates a Web page for it. I'm into the ability to change the environment remotely at this scale, but having to wait in line to have a go reminds me of the first Web telerobot, Ken Goldberg's Mercury Project from 1994. (Ken didn't like the idea of Web users having to queue up either, which is why he went on to develop methods for collaborative telerobotics.) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created Vectorial Elevation in 1999 for Mexico City's Zócalo Square. The installation will be online in Vancouver through February 28. From the project's concept page:

This website includes a virtual model of Vancouver where you are able to design "light sculptures" with 20 robotic searchlights located along English Bay. Once you are happy with your design you submit it together with your name, location and dedication or comments. Every night from dusk to dawn new designs are quietly rendered sequentially as they are added to a queue. The project automatically creates a personal webpage for each participant, documenting his or her contribution with views from 4 project webcams. With a 15 Km visibility radius, the installation intends to blend the virtual space of the Internet with one of the most emblematic public spaces in Vancouver.

Vectorial Elevation

daedae writes "It seems Facebook has been granted a patent for the news feed, as a method of monitoring activities, storing them in a database, and displaying an appropriate set of activities to an appropriate set of users. 'That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, "This could be very big. ... MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's?" The patent may not be that broad. Nick O'Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn't appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. "It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. ... Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial," O'Neill wrote.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This gentleman is Tony Alexander Pete, 43, aka "Happy." Police in Ogden, Utah are seeking Happy who is a suspect in a burglary that took place Wednesday evening. Happy, a career criminal, is easily identified due to his unique facial tattoos. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The victim told police that he was asleep about 7:30 p.m. when he was awakened to find the pair standing over him. At first, the men yelled that they were cops, then threw the blanket over him.

"The guy said he could still see from under the blanket though, and he described one of them as having 'clown eyes.' "[The victim] said he knew him as 'Happy,' because he had been staying there with him until recently," Sangberg said.

"Ogden cops have out clown posse - literally"

At Institute for the Future, we've started a project looking at the future of persuasion and how technology affects behavior. The researchers are blogging on the subject here, mostly as a way for us to share examples, initial thoughts, and essays-in-progress with each other (and anyone else interested in the subject). Today, my friend Mathias Crawford wrote a very thoughtful and provocative post about persuasive game designed to, say, persuade you to eat less, exercise more, or increase your productivity. In his essay, Mathias suggests that the real potential for persuasive games isn't just to change behavior but also to help us understand why we behave a certain way. From the essay, titled "Ends vs. Means and Persuasive Games" on IFTF's Persuasion blog:

As (Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse) Schell points out (in a videotaped speech making the rounds this week), persuasive technologies like the Ford Fusion dashboard, are already being designed with game-like feedback in mind. To him these technologies fall short, however, because they are being engineered by people who are not game designers. If game designers would start to design reward systems that aimed to improve behaviors, we'd have feedback mechanisms that are much more enjoyable, and as a corollary that are much more effective.

Though I agree with his conclusion - that there is a clear need for people with game design expertise to design things that can help people improve behaviors - by focusing on creating technologies that aim to achieving measurable ends, Schell misses a much more important use of persuasive technologies: namely, technology that aims to influence means.

"Ends vs. Means and Persuasive Games"

What do you do once you are already a skilled radio designer and restorer? Well, if you are Greg Charvot, you decide to build a shortwave radio using a single type of transistor as an active element. Normally, one would use number of different transistors, each designed to handle different amounts of power and amplifying bandwidth. Limiting yourself to a single type may seem like a mental exercise today (pun intended), but was apparently much more common back when transistors weren't easy to come by, so Greg isn't completely off his rocker. Also, by only using one kind of part, it should make repairs much easier.

Designing a radio like this is a little bit complicated, but not nearly as much as it might sound. The trick is to divide the radio function into manageable pieces, which can then be designed and tested individually. You will notice that Greg's radio (pictured above) is made up of a bunch of small prototyping boards. Each board contains a single circuit with a specific function, and physically separating them makes it much easier to test the parts, as well as swap out the ones that might be malfunctioning. It's also a neat design aesthetic, because it very closely resembles the way you would draw an electrical schematic to represent the circuit.

If you are interested in building a radio, I would strongly recommend giving it a go. Start with a kit, though, and pick one that explains the design of each stage so that you can learn how it works. It will definitely be an interesting experience, and who knows, it could be the start of a new passion! If you have a favorite kit or other guide to recommend, chime in on the comments.

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There was some news a few days back about how people who use Pandora end up buying more music, while people who use Spotify do not. Of course, if you understand these two services, this should be completely obvious. After all, Pandora is like radio -- with a bit of randomness, and no real way to just play what you want. Spotify, on the other hand, is designed to replicate your music collection -- a cloud-based iTunes. Unfortunately, those who focus too narrowly on the idea that music sales is the music business may find this news as further support for moving away from services like Spotify. On top of that, I've heard from people who were at the conference where this "research" was announced, and it turns out that the guy presenting it never mentioned Spotify at all. It's just that the press is assuming he meant Spotify.

However, either way, just looking narrowly at music sales is a mistake. As we've discussed, selling music is not a very good business any more, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good music business models -- it's just that selling music probably isn't one of them.

With that in mind, it's worth taking a look at a recent report put out by Will Page, an economist for PRS in the UK -- and the guy who put out that report last year showing that the music industry was actually growing, not shrinking, when you looked at all the component parts. In his latest report, Page takes on the question of "average revenue per user" (ARPU) when it comes to the music consumer out there -- with a specific look at Spotify (and, unlike the NPD report that's getting all this press, Page actually has real info about Spotify).

Around here, we're used to hearing about ARPU in the context of telcos. It's a stat that telco execs and Wall Street money folks obsess over. Five years back, we warned why the telcos obsessive focus on ARPU was dangerous, and could lead to bad long-term strategic decisions. Page's report effectively suggests the same thing is true in the case of the music business. With the move to various music services, such as Spotify and Pandora, there is a sudden push to look at "ARPU" of music consumers as well -- and if the average music buyer in the UK spends £63 on music, and Spotify can get them to sign up for a £120 plan, that seems like a pretty good thing. Right?

But, as Page notes, the real story is a hell of a lot more complicated than that. What if Spotify is picking off just the "top users" who were actually spending £150 per year? Or, what if it's getting people who didn't buy music at all to pay for subscriptions? Then, any direct revenue is incremental, and the pricing could really matter -- since lower prices could bring in a lot more total revenue by bringing new "buyers" into the market. Furthermore, just focusing on the ARPU from direct payments for music (sales or subscriptions) misses a big part of the story. Live shows are a large and growing part of the market, but don't make it into such calculations. Merchandise and other direct-to-fan offerings also probably aren't included in many of those calculations. And, in fact, we've heard that Spotify is looking to enable those other business models as well -- and isn't just focused on the obsolete metric of "music sales."

As such, services like Pandora and Spotify shouldn't necessarily be judged on how much they contribute to plain old music sales, or even direct ARPU -- but how much they drive people to spend money within the music ecosystem -- and then figure out where that money goes, and whether or not it's allocated in a way that benefits or harms the various players in the space. If Spotify helps make every other aspect of the music industry more valuable, but depresses the market for direct music sales, that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing at all.

Once again, it reminds us of the necessity to not get too narrowly focused on a subsegment of the market when trying to figure out what's happening -- but to explore the larger ecosystem of how much money is being generated around music -- and then we can look at where it goes and what it funds. That is, we shouldn't be worried about how much people spend on horse carriages, but on transportation. So remember that whenever you hear numbers being thrown around about how much money is being made or "lost" in various industries. If you don't look at the overall ecosystem, you often miss what's happening.

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Several sources are reporting on a new metric that computer scientists are going after with respect to recommender systems — recommendation diversity. "In a paper that will be released by PNAS, a group of scientists are pushing the limits of recommendation systems, creating new algorithms that will make more tangential recommendations to users, which can help expand their interests, which will increase the longevity and utility of the recommendation system itself. Accuracy has long been the most prized measurement in recommending content, like movies, links, or music. However, computer scientists note that this type of system can narrow the field of interest for each user the more it is used. Improved accuracy can result in a strong filtering based on a user's interests, until the system can only recommend a small subset of all the content it has to offer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

shewfig writes "The California legislature, which previously tried to ban incandescent light bulbs, just added to the list of banned things... swear words! Fortunately, the measure only for the first week of March, and compliance is voluntary — although, apparently, there will be a 'swear jar' in the Assembly and the Governor's mansion. No word yet on whether the Governator intends to comply."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Due for downloadable release next week (unfortunately, in Japan only), Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda (which, via Tiny Cartridge, roughly translates to Hidden 3D Image: There It Is!) probably comes as close as anything we've seen so far to answering that long-burning question, "What're the cameras on the DSi really for?" Augmented reality games haven't quite flourished, "print club" distractions don't hold much sway in the West -- but achieving good Johnny Lee-style 3D by motion tracking via the DSi's front-mounted camera is something we can all get on board for, even if it's just for the simple paper-cut hidden object minigame Attakoreda offers. Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda is out next Wednesday, March 3rd -- I'll update then with a report on just how well it works.

DJ Carlito, aka my brother Carl, who has become the go-to deejay for Indian weddings in Virginia (I am absolutely not kidding), shares the links and images in this post and explains:

Holi, the yearly festival celebrating the return of color to the world, will start on Sunday Feb 28, 2010 and continue for 2 days until Monday March 1st. Holi is celebrated on the Phalgun Purnima (or Pooranmashi, Full Moon) according to the Hindu Calendar. Holi is a festival of radiance (teja) in the universe. The celebrations officially usher in spring, the celebrated season of love. There are several stories of the origin of Holi -- and several various deities are involved in this holiday.

More about the celebration here. Video above: Rang Barse. Another goodie: Holi Aai Re," from the Bollywood classic Mashaal. Another gem from one of the biggest Bollywood blockbusters ever: Holi ke Din. And here's another Holi-themed video you may dig.

More about DJ Carlito (aka Xeni's kid brother, available for all your Indian wedding DJ needs): blog, Myspace. Listen to his weekly radio show "If Music Could Talk" Sundays 7-9pm EST online or on-air at WRIR in Virginia, and dig his show archive here online.

If you're in NYC on March 7, you can get your Holi on at a big parade on that date. Scanned flyer below. Hopefully the snow will have melted by then! Watch the videos in this post, and you'll see why the parade organizers have to warn people not to bring water guns or rainbow powder (it's right there on the flyer!)

DJ Carlito adds,

It's also worth mentioning that the "colors" used to be made from Dhak and Palash flowers but in more recent times have been made from such synthetic materials as metal alloys mixed with asbestos --- theres a movement to go "organic" again with the colors -- which are thrown, smeared, squirted on everyone you meet... but then by accident often inhaled, ingested, swallowed in the process. It's also the only holiday where use of ganga is pretty much widespread in the form of "bhang" -- which is ganga mixed with herbs and spices in a milky beverage form. The use of bhang is regulated by the government, and only authorized "dealers" can sell it. The drink is traditionally said to come from Shiva. I'm not sure how widespread the use is but friends tell me that its very common in the celebration.

The Smithsonian National Zoo just got a Pacific Giant Octopus. (Weeeelll, sort of. It's a baby, and currently only about three pounds. But it'll be giant someday, promise.) The little critter doesn't have a name yet, but he (they think it's probably a he, maybe) does have a web cam. The camera is set up to capture the octopus at feeding times—11 and 3 Eastern, daily. Which is, coincidentally, right about the time I could use a good cephalopod fix in my day.

Even better, this announcement led me to discover that the National Zoo has a ton of different animal web cams. Seriously, they're set up like a bunch of teenage emo girls over there. Lions, naked mole rats (!!), single-celled organisms, sloth bears (?!): You can watch 'em all live.

It sounded like a dream: a health club for nerds, only instead of treadmills and weight sets, members paid $125/month to work with CNC routers, laser cutters, and other high-end gadgets. The first of three TechShops opened in Menlo Park, California in 2006 but two more, one in Beaverton OR and the other in Durham, NC followed.

Currently, only the Cali shop remains open.

Both the TechShop Portland and TechShop Durham have closed their doors and are seeking smaller spaces. In the former case, it appears the shop was evicted after missing two months' rent.

In a Toolmonger.com forum thread, TechShop Durham founder Scott Saxon blamed the economy:

We have just under 25,000 sf here and secured our lease, as did Portland, during financially good times. The economy tanked right after we both started. Lack of funding is not the reason for anything. The reason we are moving is the landlord is unwilling to adjust to the current times. The rent here is simply too much.

We are moving to a much cheaper facility and with our present membership, about the same as Portland, we will succeed in 2010. I believe Portland will do the same. This is not political speak. This is just the way it is as told by the numbers.

Could it also be that the shops are experiencing member drain from the burgeoning hackerspace movement?

What do you think, readers? Is the day of the giant franchised TechShop over, to replaced by smaller, leaner, nonprofit hackerspaces? Will Portland and RDU bounce back along with the economy? Leave your thoughts in comments.

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Kevin Bankston at the EFF blogs,

Yesterday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to renew three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, after the Senate abandoned the PATRIOT reform effort and approved the extension by a voice vote on Wednesday night.

Disappointingly, the government's dangerously broad authority to conduct roving wiretaps of unspecified or "John Doe" targets, to secretly wiretap of persons without any connection to terrorists or spies under the so-called "lone wolf" provision, and to secretly access a wide range of private business records without warrants under PATRIOT Section 215 were all renewed without any new checks and balances to prevent abuse.

EFF: Epic Fail in Congress: USA PATRIOT Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections

[Image: Patriot Act, a Creative Commons-licensed illustration by Wiretap Studios, large version here.]