destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings...can be done by computers for pennies an hour," adding that AI "is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity...and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were just talking about how some in the recording industry are realizing that raising prices on downloadable songs may have been a mistake (just as the book publishing world is pushing to raise ebook prices -- despite a fair bit of evidence that people actually are expecting prices to go in the other direction). It's as if they don't understand price elasticity and how you can quite often maximize revenue by lowering price.

In the video game world, at least, they seem more open to this concept. Last year we wrote about Valve reporting on some numbers that showed the more they reduced the price, the greater the money they brought in. In the case of reducing the price by 75%, Valve found sales increased 1470%. Not bad! But apparently an online video gaming store in Sweden has them beat.

Rasmus Larsson points us to a report from an online gaming store that also reduced prices by 75% and saw sales increase by an astounding 5500% (Google translation from the original). A similar test, with a price decrease of 50% saw sales increase 533%. Interestingly, after each price decrease, the company put the price back up again and saw a (slight) sales increase at the higher price too. As the article notes "the price is marketing."

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Born of a time when novel ideas and game mechanics were flourishing and the rules were being rewritten with every new release, Taito's 1983 arcade original Elevator Action might not have achieved the certifiable classic status of Pac-Man or Galaga or Taito's own earlier Space Invaders, but it remains a true cult hit, remembered best for its semi-slapstick themes of lighthearted espionage. It's a franchise that never managed to lift itself up as well as it deserved: its 1994 arcade sequel -- even more lavishly animated (and far more cheerily ultraviolent) than the original -- only saw console release in Japan on the Sega Saturn, and, most curiously, as a Game Boy Color release re-skinned via Cartoon Network in the U.S. as a Dexter's Laboratory game. All of that could have changed in 2008, when Taito was pitched a Nintendo DS revival of the franchise, a pitch that would center on original character designs by long-time favorite illustrator (and occasional Vice Magazine comics contributor) James Harvey, better known by his swapped-around pen name Harvey James.

A quick getaway to Japan that was meant to be for pleasure only, Harvey explains, turned into "a pretty fruitful business trip" when a friend happened to have an upcoming meeting with a Taito representative: one in charge of the secret project to bring Elevator Action back to life for Nintendo's handheld.

The friend, says Harvey, "solicited some character designs as part of his proposal for the game... The brief he gave me was to redesign the main characters, three gung-ho anti-terrorists, but to 'keep one eye on the present and one eye on the past', which is one of the more exciting briefs I've ever had. At the time, the economic proliferation of China was making big headlines, so I looked to things like modern Chinese couture and street fashion to get inspiration for my designs, as well as North Korean military uniforms and hip-hop culture."

Though the project never made it to light -- "maybe my designs are still sitting in a file at Taito somewhere, or maybe they're in the trash," Harvey adds -- the radically culturally diverse team he invented are too fantastically brash and imaginative to keep under cover. So below, a quick introduction to every member of the would-be snooper squad, printed here maybe not so much in overt hopes that it'll jog Taito's memory into giving them a second look, but it would be nice, wouldn't it?

Quite obviously the clear charmer of the three, North Korean team member Kim Min Ji uses a (curiously familiar) laser pistol that Harvey explains "charges from a tea kettle full of battery acid, which she can also hit people with."

Described simply by Harvey as a "crazy white kid in a Halloween suit", Brussels Tibia's special power would have been his deadly flying kick.

Finally, Muslim radical Rakim Al Taff (his name a callback to Elevator Action Return's original Engrish-ed up "tough" guy Jad the "Taff") looks no less foreboding in his dashing pink cap, and would have come equipped with a running clothesline special move.

More of Harvey's art can be seen via his freshly redesigned portfolio site, where you'll also spot T-shirts and original silkscreened prints produced for upstart games culture web-shop Attract Mode.

In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.

---

Our fearless editor Gareth has fallen victim to the giant blizzard currently hitting the east coast. The last we heard from him, he was trapped under tons of snow, he'd lost Internet access, he was out of cereal, and manflesh was starting to sound pretty good. So, assuming that Gar may be too busy fighting for survival to write his regular Toolbox post, we're putting you, the reader, on the job.

What is your favorite tool right now? My new baby is a SOG Specialty Knives B61-N. It's tough as nails and packs a Colonel Kurtz-esque black oxide finish that makes Leatherman tools tremble.

How about you, readers? Post your favorite tools in comments.

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Karaoke fanatics in the Philippines have been avoiding the song My Way because they believe it is cursed. "You can get killed," one patron, who has witnessed numerous fights at his favorite karaoke bar, told the NY Times. Several establishments have removed the Sinatra fave from their song list.

Over at True/Slant, former BB guestblogger Mark Dery asks "How Gay is the Super Bowl?" But last Sunday's spectacle is just a launching off point for a classic Deryan rant on jock culture, his own high school gym class, and the "wavering borderline between homosociality and homosexuality" in the locker room. It ends with a great, er, kicker. From the essay:

During the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday, anchorclones, talkshow hosts, politicians, and the rest of the chattering class act as if we’re one big happy congregation gathered in solemn veneration of the Gipper’s jockstrap, displayed in a monstrance. It’s the sheer presumptuousness of the sports-crazed majority that galls the unbeliever most—an obliviousness to the possibility, even, that not everyone shares the One True Faith. It’s the same genial arrogance that makes evangelical Christians so monumentally irritating to those of us who prefer a good exfoliating body scrub to being Washed in the Blood of the lamb. (The religious reference is apt: in our national religion, sports is one aspect of the Holy Trinity, the other two being the Free Market—whose invisible hand, like God’s, moves in mysterious ways, but always for the betterment of all—and Christianity, which in the American vernacular is a bizarre amalgam of self-help pep talk, Left Behind doomsaying, and theocratic fascism). From the gridiron metaphors in your pastor’s sermon to the scripted locker-room banter of local TV newsdudes, joshing about who’s gonna open a can of whupass on who, to the Fantasy Games geek at the office watercooler maundering on about who had six touchdowns and no interceptions in 12 pass attempts this season, posting a 124.3 passer rating, while outside of the red zone his rating on play-action was only 79.7 and his five touchdowns have to be measured, after all, against nine interceptions, the assumption that every red-blooded American—or at least every red-blooded American guy who isn’t a wussy—would give his Truck Nutz for Super Bowl tickets is as unconsidered as it is ubiquitous.

"Jocko Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl?"

angry tapir writes "Sony has announced a new 3D Blu-ray Disc player and upgrades to existing players so that they will be able to show high-definition 3D movies too. The company introduced the BDP-S470 Blu-ray Disc model and upgraded existing home theater systems, which will be able to play Blu-ray movies when related firmware for the devices is released later this year. Movies based on the Blu-ray 3D specification, which was finalized by the Blu-ray Association in December, can be shown on the players."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A criminologist from England's University of Leicester claims his research shows that UK burglars are switching to mugging because cheap Chinese imports have crashed the market for used DVD players and other pawnables:

"Cheap labour in China has had an impact on the type of crime that's committed in the UK and the type of goods that are stolen today. Gradually, the prices of such goods has fallen so low as to they almost have no resale value. If you can buy a DVD player for £19.99, it's simply not worth stealing..."

"While DVD players for example, got cheaper, certain consumer items became smaller and were very, very expensive and sought after and so the latest mobile phone, or the latest ipod, which people carry about them, have become targets for robbers."

It is these expensive, personal items, which are the most attractive to thieves today as they still retain value and can therefore be sold on, igniting a career change for criminals from the more traditional household burglaries to personal muggings.

Burglars Have Changed Their 'Shopping List', New Research Reveals

Chatroulette! is a new videochat site that leaves you with an undeniably WTF feeling. It randomly connects you with another stranger, and there seem to be thousands online. Don't like who you're looking at? Just hit "Next" and you'll be linked to another user. I'd say that the participants are 65 percent dudes in dorm rooms, 30 percent men masturbating, and 5 percent "other." In ten minutes of clicking the "Next" button I saw multiple individuals rapping into the camera, holding up signs urging women to bare their breasts, and an endless variety of penis sizes and shapes.
Chatroulette! (Thanks? Tara McGinley!)

Snip from Wall Street Journal article on crackdown today by Iranian authorities in advance of antigovernment protests planned for Thursday:

Iranians have reported widespread service disruptions to Internet and text messaging services, though mobile phones appeared to be operating normally Wednesday. Iran's telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google Inc.'s email services, saying instead that a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out. It wasn't clear late Wednesday what effect the order had on Google's email services in Iran.

Guess they weren't too psyched about the Buzz launch, huh? No comment yet from Google.

As Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out, this may be Iran's biggest misstep yet. They will live to regret the day they promised nationalized email. Two words: TECH SUPPORT.

[Image: "Martians over Yazd," billboard on top of a computer store in Iran. A Creative Commons-licensed image shot by Paul Keller.]

There's been a big push over the last couple months to get those full body scanners installed in more airports. These scanners, if you don't recall, basically create a "naked" image of the person in them. This has resulted in all sorts of (mostly reasonable) concerns about privacy (well, and dignity) of those passing through the devices. Defenders of these systems insist that the images are seen by someone remotely who can't see the person, so there's no way to connect the image to the person, and the scans are deleted immediately.

Except... perhaps that's not always true. Eric points us to the news that Indian movie star Shahrukh Khan (oddly, I just saw one of his movies) is claiming that the staff at London's Heathrow airport had not just connected his scan to who he was, but also printed it out and circulated it among some staff.

I have to admit, this one could use a bit more proof, because my understanding was that the scan itself is done in a remote location, but Khan seems to indicate that staff had the printouts almost immediately:

"I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out. Then I saw these girls -- they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said 'give them to me' -- and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them," stated Khan.

I could definitely see how another security or airport staffer might alert whoever was watching the remote scans of who was passing through the scanner. The last few times I've seen these devices used in airports the other security staff had radio contact with the person watching the scans (for obvious reasons). But having multiple printouts immediately distributed? It's not clear how that would happen.

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Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan claims that when he went through Heathrow, security staff printed out the naked image of his body from the full-body scanners (scanners that the authorities have claimed won't ever be used to generate printouts) and circulated them among the staff:

'I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You've got to see them. It makes you embarrassed - if you're not well endowed.

'You walk into the machine and everything - the whole outline of your body - comes out.'

Khan said he did not know that the body-scans - installed in the wake of last year's abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit - showed up every little detail of one's body.

'I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out.

'Then I saw these girls - they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said 'give them to me' - and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.'

Shah Rukh signs off sexy body-scan printouts at Heathrow (Thanks, Drew!)

(Image: S3010420, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from dodo_anji's photostream)

I think Moonie put it best when she said, "Mrowr?"

In case you've ever wondered if it's possible to strap old plastic clothes hangers together with zip ties to make an icosahedron, I bring glad tidings: It is. I've done the experiment. We have the technology. I expect to be hearing from the Royal Swedish Academy any day now...

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Iraq today ordered former employees of the mercenary machine formerly known as Blackwater (now "Xe") to leave the country.

appl_iran writes "Iran's telecommunications agency announced that it would be suspending Google's email services permanently, saying it would roll out its own national email service." From the short article linked: "An Iranian official said the measure was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government, according to the Wall Street Journal." Funny way to go about that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is what Space Shuttle Endeavor astronauts just woke up to: Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss. @Astro_Nicholas requested it. I'm listening live on Soma FM's Mission Control channel, and loving it.

Here's an interesting idea by Kenyan maker Dominic Wanjihia. By taking the rim from a Sufuria cooking pot, flipping it upside down, and attaching it to a slightly smaller pot, he was able to more efficiently capture heat from a fire. The result should be that less fuel is required to cook a meal, which is both an economic and environmental win.

This might actually solve a problem that I've had at home. One of my cooking pots has small plastic handles on it's sides instead of a single long one. So much heat escapes from my gas range around the side of the pot that it heats up the handles, making it difficult to pick up. Of course I could just use a pot with a different handle, however Dominic's device makes me wonder if that heat would be better captured if the pot had an oversize bottom to completely cover the burner. Think it would work? Does anyone sell them? If not, I might have to break out the welder and do some experiments... [via afrigadget]

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A Diesel Sweeties Valentine. (thanks, R. Stevens!)

Google says: "We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections."

Click here to see the image above in the wild. News story, auto-translated to English in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. More on Google Maps. (thanks, BB reader Kjetil Rydland in Norway!)

The character above may look like a Muppet dropped into the Land of the Lost, but it's supposed to be Bigfoot. Fisher Price's Bigfoot the Monster will make his debut at the Toy Fair trade show this weekend in New York City. The remote-controlled beastie is cute, but I ain't never seen a Sasquatch with blue eyes before. Cryptomundo: Toy Fair 2010's Bigfoot

IceDiver writes "I am a teacher in a small rural school. My Grade 9 students are doing a unit on astronomy this spring. I have access to a 4" telescope, and would like to give my students a chance to use it. We will probably only be able to attempt observations on a couple of nights because of weather and time restrictions. I am as new to telescope use as my students, so I have no idea what objects would look good through a 4" lens. What observations should I attempt to have my students make? In other words, how can I make best use of my limited equipment and time to give my students the best experience possible?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, it seemed like Warner Music actually had a better handle on where the music industry was heading than its 3 major label rivals. In the last two years, however, it seems like WMG has consistently gone further and further in the opposite direction. It may have hit a new low today with the announcement that it will pull out of all free streaming music licensing offers. Yes, Warner Music just told the one thing that was effectively competing with unauthorized downloads to shove off. Brilliant.

"Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.

"The 'get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price' strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future."

And thus, WMG will go out of business that much more quickly. That is the model that the market is moving to, and Bronfman and WMG appear to have decided to ignore what the market wants, to cover their eyes, stick fingers in their ears and go down with a ship that could easily be righted. Incredible.

Now, Warner may be a bit gun-shy after its investment in iMeem (a free online music streaming service) became a total disaster, but what Warner doesn't seem to realize is that a big part of why it failed was the ridiculous demands Warner put on iMeem in terms of how much it demanded in payment per stream. The problem is that WMG has totally unrealistic expectations of how much money should be paid per stream, and that's because the company's top execs still don't seem to handle basic economic modeling particularly well. And thus, the company will fail.

You don't compete with "free" by taking your ball and going home. You don't compete with "free" by pretending that old artificial scarcities are coming back after the wall has been broken down. You don't compete with "free" by suing customers. You don't compete with "free" by shunning those who have business models that work. You compete with free by offering a better product and a better business model. WMG is choosing to go in the other direction. Best of luck to them...

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Smithsonian posted a lovely slideshow of ten carnivorous plants. Of course, classics like the Venus Flytrap and Pitcher plant are featured, but so are several I wasn't familiar with such as the Waterwheel, Rainbow plant, and King sundew, pictured above:

Though the king sundew (Drosera regia) grows only in one valley in South Africa, members of the Drosera genus can be found on all continents except Antarctica. Charles Darwin devoted much of his book Insectivorous Plants to the sundews. Sticky mucilage on Drosera plants traps prey--usually an insect attracted to light reflecting off drops of dew or to the plant's reddish tentacles--and eventually suffocates it. Digestive enzymes then break down the plant's meal.

"Ten Plants That Put Meat on Their Plates"

Heroin laced with anthrax has killed nearly a dozen people and sickened many more in the UK and Germany over the last three months. From The Guardian:

The surge of cases – the most serious anthrax outbreak in the UK in recent times – has puzzled police and health experts, who remain uncertain how or where the heroin became infected. The frequently lethal bacteria is mostly found in animals in Asia and Africa, and very rarely occurs in Europe.

They are investigating whether the heroin was contaminated at its likely source in Afghanistan, perhaps from contaminated soils or contact with infected animal skins, or was infected by a cutting agent used by drugs dealers or traffickers closer to Europe...

Dr Arif Rajpura, the director of public health with NHS Blackpool, repeated warnings to heroin users to stop taking the drug or watch closely for unusual symptoms, including rashes, swelling, severe headaches or high temperatures.

"Anthrax-contaminated heroin kills drug user" (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

"We do recognize that we're going to incur the wrath of the traditionalists. New ideas are always in danger of being beaten to death by those whose apple carts they upset."—Frank Magid, the television executive credited for inventing "Action News" and making local TV news insipid and formulaic. He died last Friday of lymphoma at age 78. (via telstarlogistic)

itwbennett writes "Once the largest telecom show in the United States, and arguably the world, SUPERCOMM has been shelved for financial reasons, the Telecommunications Industry Association announced yesterday. Blogger Tom Henderson speculates that the new emphasis on mobility rather than the landline infrastructure is partly to blame. (The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and CTIA Wireless are the beneficiaries of this shift.) But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Actor/director/model/martial artist/smug bastard Dolph Lundgren can sing and play drums while karate-chopping glass bricks, surrounded by flappers in gogo boots. As one YouTube commenter aptly put it, he's "as charismatic as a? maniac cyborg assassin." And as another asked, "sweet? Jesus, why?"

Video Link. The ass-kicking starts around 2:38. I wonder if he'll become governor of California sometime soon. (thanks, Antinous!)

Some must-read stuff: “Don’t be so quick to excuse yourself. If 80% of success is just showing up, 90% is showing up early.”

It all started when Chris Anderson wrote an article for WIRED titled "In The Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are The New Bits in which he took the position that, in effect, "making" constituted a new paradigm that would reshape the way manufacturing works. Along came feisty blogger Joel Johnson of Gizmodo who penned a withering rebuttal titled Atoms Are Not Bits; WIRED is not a Business Magazine.

We at MAKE are a little prejudiced toward the Andersonian model, maybe because it makes us look like heroes. Vanity aside, there's certainly a lot of compelling evidence that we're on to something. Look at commercial ventures, like Makerbot and Adafruit, born of an open-source maker ethos that does not at all resemble the way regular businesses operate -- even small businesses. Still, we're all about a spirited debate. To this end, we've invited Joel to come and make his case. For the home team: MAKE magazine's founder and publisher, Dale Dougherty! Click through to follow the scrum.

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I'm at the TED conference this week, held in Long Beach, California. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it is an annual gathering of amazing ideas and stories. Here's a list of TED 2010 speakers.

In past years, I've posted summaries of all the presentations, but this year I'm going to write a daily wrap-up instead. I'll post my first this evening.

The highlight of TED each year is the TED prize. The winner of this year's prize is celebrity chef and international nutrition advocate Jamie Oliver, who gets $100,000 and "the opportunity to present his wish to change the world." CNN is live streaming Oliver’s talk, "in which he will reveal his one wish to change the world." You'll be able to watch it here at 8:50 p.m. (ET).

I was happy to learn that Intelligentsia Coffee is making espresso drinks for everyone at TED, and our pal Kyle Glanville, Intelligentsia's director of espresso research and development and first place winner of the National Barista Championship, is pulling shots. Kyle just made me a mind bending double espresso!

Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro is about to perform, so I'm signing off to enjoy his performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Above, a multiscreen, ultrafast Google Earth station, called Liquid Galaxy. I shot a video that I'll upload later. Photo by Marla Aufmuth, an old Wired colleague of mine.

Just as we were getting ready to push out Derek's post about broadband competition, it looks like Google tossed a bit of a grenade into the mix, announcing plans to at least start trials of super high speed fiber-to-the-home networks in some areas. Of course, there have been rumors for years that Google might get into the internet access business. It had invested in a failed broadband-over-powerlines operation, and there had always been talk of a Google wireless solution -- but none of those seemed particularly serious (even Google's muni-WiFi experiment in its hometown of Mountain View has been somewhat half-hearted). So, it might be a bit early to look to Google to really dive in as a serious broadband competitor, but it certainly does raise some interesting questions.

From the very beginning we've been arguing that the real issue isn't about net neutrality, but about competition -- a point Derek reiterated -- and anything that drives more competition in the broadband space is a good thing. And, since Google monetizes internet access in many other areas, it doesn't need to be greedy about how it grants access to the pipes. But, even more interesting is that Google seems to realize that if you have a fiber to the home network at the infrastructure-level, the really interesting play is actually letting multiple service providers compete above that:

We will allow third-parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other services, using our network. We believe this approach will maximize user choice as well as spur greater innovation and competition. Most providers in Europe and many places elsewhere in the world operate open access networks. It will be open to any service provider, including incumbents and new entrants. "Open" means open.

By no means is it guaranteed that Google will be able to succeed in this market. In fact, I'd probably bet against it if you were laying odds. It's just a really tough business to be in, especially as a brand new entrant, and I'm not convinced that Google will focus enough on this to make it a success. But I hope I'm wrong. More serious entrants into the market would be a good thing, and Google's view on line-sharing is exactly right: it does tend to encourage greater innovation. So hopefully this is something that works in trials and gets expanded more widely.

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FrazzledDad writes "'We let the tests we wrote do more harm than good.' That snippet from the preface of Roy Osherove's The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET (AOUT hereafter) is the wrap up of a frank description of a failed project Osherove was part of. The goal of AOUT is teaching you great approaches to unit testing so you won't run into similar failures on your own projects." Keep reading for the rest of FrazzledDad's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dandelion is a wearable kinetic sculpture that generates electricity through small, flower-like windmills. [via Fashioning Technology]

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The Reverse MVNO 

There has been a big trend towards MVNO carriers in the mobile space - that is, carriers who are Mobile Virtual Network Operators, and don't actually operate their own cellular towers, spectrum, and network. These MVNOs outsource that part of the business to the big cellular operators as wholesale buyers, and focus on the marketing, the handsets, the retail, the billing, and the services. But in telecom these days, it's highly desirable to offer bundles of services, mixing fixed, mobile, Internet and TV packages to drive up total revenue and customer loyalty. Thus, it's interesting to note the start of a new trend, the FVNO, where the F is for Fixed. In the UK, O2 mobile has decided to expand their business into the fixed telecom sector, and is doing so by reselling the infrastructure of BT (British Telecom) under their own brand.

On Broadband Competition 

Aside from the quirk of building MVNOs backwards, the shift is notable for readers here in the US, because it is illustrative of the kind of competition that can result when incumbent players are required to wholesale their fixed assets. O2, now owned by Spain's Telefonica, was a wireless-only company, but already offers fixed broadband to enterprise customers using BT's all-IP "21st Century Network". This move is indicative of a market where new entrants are free to launch, consumers have a wider range of choices, DSL speeds are faster, and yes, prices end up lower. So how exactly is that telco-cable duopoly working out for us in the US?

American readers not yet upset with the state of broadband in the US should feel free to click any of the links in the preceding paragraph to see the effect that competition has on a market. It makes all the players better, and offers huge benefits to consumers. The USA had exactly the same kind of competition codified into the Telecommunication Act of 1996. The act required incumbents to share their last mile through a regulation called UNE-P. UNE-P had some early effects: You may remember DSL upstarts that sprang onto the market like Speakeasy or Covad. But our UNE-P lacked teeth, and the incumbents were able to charge much higher wholesale prices than in Europe, where competition picked up steam. So by 2005, instead of re-enforcing UNE-P in the Telecom Reform Bill, your Congress killed it completely. In this article, Masnick talks about how it mattered little, because the wholesale price was sabotaging the effort anyway.

On Net Neutrality 

So now here we are in the US in 2010, still debating Network Neutrality. Does it look like "Net Neutrality" regulation is necessary in the UK? Heck no. Competition has completely obviated the need for Brits to regulate. Regulation is only necessary when monopoly powers are in effect, and the free market can't push Supply to offer what is in Demand. And what of the doomsday outcomes incumbents predict if they are forced to share assets? Did BT fall apart? Go bankrupt? Stop investing in any new infrastructure (as lobbyists say is the obvious outcome.) No! They became global leaders in rebuilding, investing, modernizing infrastructure, and launched the all-IP 21Century Network! BT became very good at wholesale as well as retail. Competition made every UK stakeholder better. So why don't we Americans forget Net Neutrality: Let's focus on bringing competition back to the US market. Our duopoly experiment has failed (surprise, surprise), the European examples are crystal clear. This debate is no longer theoretical.

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introt writes "After first being blocked in 2008, an Italian court has once again ruled that ISPs in the nation must block access to the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay, leaving millions of users without access to one of the most popular sites on the planet. In the original case, after an appeal by the Pirate Bay, the Court of Bergamo ruled that foreign websites cannot be blocked over alleged copyright infringement. Fast forward until today and the Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can indeed be forced to block torrent sites, even if they are foreign-based."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skeptical Science has an iPhone app that allows you to browse common critiques of climate science and arguments against climate change, and read expert responses. Perfect for both the curious, and the argumentative-on-the-go.(Thanks to Steve Easterbrook for the tip!)

Yeah, that's lightning. On an exploding volcano. It's enough to make me want to bring back the original umlaut in "Körth".

Where's the lightning coming from? APoD says:

Why lightning occurs even in common thunderstorms remains a topic of research, and the cause of volcanic lightning is even less clear. Surely, lightning bolts help quench areas of opposite but separated electric charges. One hypothesis holds that catapulting magma bubbles or volcanic ash are themselves electrically charged, and by their motion create these separated areas. Other volcanic lightning episodes may be facilitated by charge-inducing collisions in volcanic dust.

We're not sure how, but this family has managed to combine two opposite forces to create this giant chimera of a fire-breathing snowman. All we know is that the world may never be safe again! [via neatorama]

More:

• Flame gun makes winter work a lot easier
• World's noisiest flamethrower
• Anti-flamethrower mosquito
• Josh Leo's Cornstarch Flamethrower

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prourl writes "The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the 2010 'We're Linux' video contest. The contest seeks to find the best user-generated videos that demonstrate what Linux means to those who use it and inspire others to try it." Sadly, the winner will almost certainly be edited in Final Cut Pro on a Mac ;)

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Hug Machine (via Neatorama)

Sometimes I wonder if it's simply inevitable for industries facing disruptive change to react badly to it. We spend a lot of time here trying to discuss ways that various industries can avoid doing stupid, self-defeating things, and yet, inevitably, they do them anyway. Copycense points us to an article by Susan Piver, an author, who was formerly a recording industry exec, complaining that publishers are acting just like the record labels did ten years ago. However, it might not be in the way you'd expect. She's not talking about them just responding in anti-consumer ways, but in sitting back and hoping that someone else will find a magic bullet that "saves the industry" and that they can just copy:

The "somebody do something that works so we can copy it" mentality duplicates the kind of hoping-for-the-best attitude espoused by long-time executives in music who simply could not or would not question the viability of the professional cocoons they'd built for themselves. And who can blame them -- corporate mega structures are schooled in consolidation as the primary means of growth, not fleet-footed, shape-shifting responsiveness to change. But now we're in a world where getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is.

Piver makes a really good point, as well, that people are still looking at the music industry as if it was "killed" by unauthorized downloads -- but nothing is further from the truth:

Downloads did not kill the music business. Shortsightedness and turf-protection on the part of music business executives did. Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.

Instead, Piver points out that, just as in the music industry, there's a ton of opportunity for those who embrace it, even as those who don't incorrectly will claim the industry is dying:

Without making friends with this beast, my guess is that in 2-5 years we'll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic or chopped into whatever the ring-tone equivalent will be in publishing, and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.

There's more good stuff in there as well, but it brings up some really good points. But, part of the problem is that the traditional (false) music industry narrative is still the predominant one. People still think that music industry is dying, even as it's thriving (it's just the recording industry segment that's struggled). And so as everyone tries to "avoid what happened to the music business" they're going to make huge mistakes if they focus on the false narratives.

Already, today, we're seeing that the publishing industry is just focusing on making ebooks available, but doing little to recognize how consumer behavior is changing in how they interact with media (which is as big a part of this market change as any new method of distribution). If the publishing industry is going to figure this out, it needs to not look for some silver bullet that brings things back to "the way it used to be," but to really spend time trying to understand what people are doing today with media -- and, actually, the music world is a good place to start, if they focus on the success stories of what's working, not the complaints from the parts of the industry that have held back.

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I welcome comments that add other perspectives especially those that actively disagree with me in a vigorous way. However, I don't allow negative comments about people. There are plenty of places on the Internet for you to express those opinions.

If a response to your comment must either be defensive or explain how offensive your comment is, I just delete your comment and block you from further participation.

As long as you stick to discussing issues and products, no problem, but as soon as it gets personal -- goodbye, and there are no appeals.

Another thing I don't like is talking about me in the third person in the comments. Think of a comment here as a Letter to the Editor, and on this blog, the editor is me. If you're talking about me to someone else, either take it offline or skip it.

Update: If a comment is sarcastic or devoid of information or ideas, especially if it is anonymous -- I delete that too. There's no point blocking anonymous people, for obvious reasons. You think someone is talking gibberish but you don't have the guts to put your name on it -- why should anyone care?

gmuslera writes "Not enough speed from your ISP? Google seems to go into that market too. 'We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.' The goal isnt just to give ultra fast speed for some lucky ones, but to test under that conditions things like new generations of apps, and deployment techniques that take advantage of it." If they need a test neighborhood, I'm sure mine would be willing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 50-cent word here is "steganography," which per Wikipedia is "the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message." You may have heard, for instance, that you can encode a hidden message in, say, an image file, in such a way that no one who wasn't looking for it would know that it's there.

Well, this morning Danger Room linked to a post at IEEE Spectrum to the effect that Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is particularly susceptible to steganographic hijinks. Wired's David Pierce put it this way:

There's only the smallest possible time for interception to happen since all data is stored locally rather than redirected through a central server. Plus, since so much data is being sent back and forth, large messages can be sent without causing any alarm. Unlike an image or video, which can be downloaded and analyzed at anytime, there's no way to get at and store files sent with VoIP.

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Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes a piece advocating for Pop-Ups and even more obtrusive advertising. But not for the reasons you might think. He says "Annoying pop-up ads have been a great friend to Internet freedom, by enabling the operation of proxy sites that would be too expensive to operate otherwise. With the rising costs of making new proxy sites to stay ahead of the "censorware" companies, even more intrusive ads could be an even bigger friend to Internet freedom. Got any ideas for how those more intrusive ads could work?" Clicky clicky below to read his point.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've had numerous discussions on this site about both the legality and ethics of open WiFi networks. And yet, the issue still comes up now and again -- but who knew it was a Constitutional issue? Thomas O'Toole shares the news of a ruling in Oregon, that suggests a user who left his WiFi open gave up certain 4th Amendment rights to privacy. Though, actually, the details of the case suggest it's not so much the open WiFi that's the issue, but the fact that the guy also left illegal material in shared Limewire and iTunes folders. It was just that police were able to confirm that by connecting to his open WiFi. But the court does make a specific statement on the WiFi issue, noting:

"as a result of the ease and frequency with which people use each others' wireless networks, I conclude that society recognizes a lower expectation of privacy in information broadcast via an unsecured wireless network router than in information transmitted through a hardwired network or password-protected network."

While O'Toole doesn't think there's anything earth shattering about this, I'm not sure I agree. I think, in this case, the guy probably gave up rights to privacy by putting the content in shared folders that were available widely -- but I don't think that just because you're using an open WiFi network you've set yourself a "lower expectation of privacy." I would suspect that most users have no idea that it's less secure, and I wonder why the type of network used should really determine the level of 4th Amendment protections.

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On the drive back from Madison yesterday, I listened to a lecture by MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle on the very personal relationships we have with objects, particularly the objects that help us think. Turkle talked about her 2008 book, Falling for Science, a collection of interviews with MIT students, and established scientists, about the objects that first drew their minds to math, computers, science and technology. Some were what you'd expect: Broken radios, Legos, a computer. But one story, about a My Little Pony, really caught my attention.

I had several small plastic Ponies that I used to play make-believe with my friends. But I had one larger, plush My Little Pony, a bright-green stuffed horse with a vivid pink mane and tail that I played with all by myself. I would sit for hours on my own, braiding and rebraiding its tail. I developed a system for braiding the tail of my Pony that taught me about mathematical concepts-- from division to recursion.

Read more of computer scientist Christine Alvarado's story after the cut.

When I started, I took the hair on the Pony's tail and divided it into three pieces for braiding. Soon I became bored with a single braid. I then divided the tail into nine pieces and made three groups. I braided each group of three until I had three braids, then took these three braids and braided them together.

Soon I was up to starting with twenty-seven pieces (nested down to nine braids, then to three and then one) and then on to eighty-one. All the while I was learning about math: I saw that division is the process of taking a large number of things and grouping them into a smaller number of groups. In order to end up with one even braid at the end, I had to be able to divide the initial number evenly by three, then by three,and then by three again, until I ended up with just one braid.

I learned that I had to start with speci?c numbers of pieces in order for the braid to come out evenly. These speci?c numbers, of course, turned out to be powers of three. Overall, though, what I liked most about braiding was recursion. The large braid was made up of smaller braids that in turn were also made up of smaller braids, and I pushed this structure as far as I could take it. I once attempted to begin the braiding process with 243 pieces, but because each of these sections consisted of only about ?ve strands of hair, I was forced to give it up.

With braiding on my mind, I began to see recursion everywhere. One night at the dinner table, I was eating cauliflower and I noticed that it had the same recursive structure of my braids. Moreover, the cauliflower seemed to continue to recurse forever. I began to divide the piece of cauliflower on my plate, determined to ?nd the base level, but it split further and further until the pieces were too tiny to hold. My parents gave me a strange glance, and I continued to eat, still fascinated by the underlying structure of my vegetables.

Excerpted from Falling for Science, edited by Sherry Turkle.

Image courtesy Flickr user Katie@!, via CC

EMSL writes:

After our Tabletop Pong project, someone suggested that we should check out the Tomy Blip, a handheld game dating to 1977. And so we did. We snagged one on eBay, and here it is: "Blip, the digital game." Blip is unlike any other handheld that I've played, and (as you'll see) it's quite a piece of engineering. In what follows, we give it a test drive, and then take it apart and see what makes it tick.

Check out their careful examination of what makes Blip tick.

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An anonymous reader writes "A band of cyber-attackers have taken down the Australian Parliament House website and hacked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's website in coordinated protests against government plans to filter the Internet. The group responsible, called Anonymous, is known for coordinated Internet attacks against Scientology and other groups in the past. It recently turned its attention against the AU government after it said in December that it would block access to sites featuring material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of MIT students set out to invent a Braille labeler for the MIT IDEAS Competition. Along the way they seemed to grasp a few cornerstones of invention: learning from failures, knowing your customer base and pursuing your ideas.

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alphadogg writes "An upstart Trojan horse program has decided to take on its much-larger rival by stealing data and then removing the malicious program from infected computers. Security researchers say that the relatively unknown Spy Eye toolkit added this functionality just a few days ago in a bid to displace its larger rival, known as Zeus. The feature, called "Kill Zeus," apparently removes the Zeus software from the victim's PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access to usernames and passwords. Zeus and Spy Eye are both Trojan-making toolkits, designed to give criminals an easy way to set up their own "botnet" networks of password-stealing programs. These programs emerged as a major problem in 2009, with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation estimating last October that they have caused $100 million in losses."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this series, "Letters from the Fab Academy," Shawn Wallace, member of AS220, the Providence, RI community arts space, shares his experiences with the Fab Academy, a distributed learning collaborative built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. - Gareth

Making and programming circuit boards

By Shawn Wallace

Our assignment this time around was to design a circuit board, mill it, and program it in Assembly language. Each student had to become acquainted with the following work flow:

• Designing the board
  
• Machining
  
• Stuffing components
  
• Programming
  

Makeda Stephenson in the Providence Fab Lab

In a Fab Lab, circuit boards are either milled from copper-clad PCB stock or cut on a vinyl cutter from copper tape with conductive adhesive. We try to avoid the etching process in order to limit the used chemistry we have to deal with. Whether etching or cutting, the first step is to choose one of the options for creating a tool path to send to the machine:

1. Draw the circuit as a black and white PNG image and bring it into cad.py for tracing.

2. Draw the circuit using Eagle, a free PCB drafting tool, and export Gerber files, a standard format for PCBs. Gerber files can be converted into PNGs using gerbv or the online tool from circuitpeople.com. Bring the PNGs into cad.py for tracing.

3. Draw the circuit in Eagle and use Eagle's CAM processor to generate mill and drill files that can be sent directly to the machine. This process was described by Marc Boon in a workshop at the Amsterdam Fab Lab in 2008.
   

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A very brief piece with some initial thoughts.

I wanted to live in NY because I always wanted to live here. This is where I grew up, where my roots are, where I fit in. I've already made friends with the owner of a local hardware store and coffee shop. Their ethicities are different, but fundamentally they share the same approach to life -- that of a New Yorker.

If you came from Chicago, that's where you'd fit it, probably. Same with any other place, Florida, Paris, Costa Rica, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Sydney, Mumbai, Egypt or Israel.

But that's not all.

All my career there's been a tension between technology and media. Very early in my career I saw they'd meet, and I made a good choice to put myself firmly in the technology world, because that's where the growth was. I don't think that's where it is anymore.

I also don't think the growth is in media, believe it or not. I don't think the big organizations are going to turn the corner. I think they're finally coming around to that belief too.

But if it isn't tech and it isn't media, what is it? Ahhh.

We don't have a name for it yet. I call what I do "media hacking" and like the new Japanese doctor on Lost, I am using a phrase that only approximates what's going on.

Here's what's going to happen, imho.

There are a bunch of smart, mostly young, people who work either in tech startups or inside big publishing companies who will, in a few years, form the companies that are hybrids of technology and publishing that will lead us into the future. They won't be like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Apple. And they won't be the NY Times, Time-Warner or even the Huffington Post or Gawker. But they will learn from all of them.

Intuitively, I feel NY is where this is going to happen.

I also think a university will play a role, like Stanford and Cal did in the various tech booms, in bringing people together. That's where I belong right now, and that's why that's where I am.

Vague? Yes. But it's a Ouija board. Lots of people get to shape the future, and only ideas that work will be part of that future. The way to get there is to try lots of things out.

As I used to say in the early days of the Web boom: Zoooooooooooooom!

And Coooooooooooooool.

For a while now, the EFF has been trying to get the White House to reveal information on who lobbied to get retroactive telco immunity for warrantless wiretapping. The "we're all about transparency and openness" Obama administration has been stalling as much as possible, and while it released some info after a long fight, it still insisted that it was keeping some information private, claiming a heretofore unknown standard of "lobbyist privacy." Yeah, that's a good one. Turns out the courts don't know what it means either, and an Appeals Court has said that it's a bogus excuse, and the government needs to hand over the info:

"There is a clear public interest in public knowledge of the methods through which well-connected corporate lobbyists wield their influence."

I'm still not sure what anyone expects to get out of these documents. We know who lobbied: the telcos did, like crazy. And the reason they did so is because they know they broke the law in assisting the administration in getting info outside the official process. In fact, the recent revelations suggest the telcos didn't just accede to administration demands, but they eagerly assisted in explaining how to get around the rules. So of course they lobbied to get immunity.

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It's a direct challenge to China's Internet filtering regime... shot entirely within World of Warcraft.

"War of Internet Addiction" is an hour-long protest machinima. It satirizes Beijing's attempt to "harmonize" China's Internet with forced installations of the Green Dam censorware.

Bit of background. "Harmonize" (??) is popular China Net-speak for being censored (as it's done under the slogan of "constructing a harmonious society.")

"War of Internet Addiction" was directed by Twitter user CorndogCN, and made with dozens of volunteers on no budget (other than WoW fees).

According to Youku.com, more than 10 million Chinese netizens have seen the movie.

To navigate the language barriers and cultural in-jokes, read the in-depth analysis by DigiCha and Youku Buzz.

Check it out while you can. It hasn't been harmonized... yet.

(Thanks, Bill!)

Rish writes "A lawsuit that accused Microsoft of misleading consumers to download and install an update for Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) under the guise that it was critical security update has been tossed out. Last month, a federal judge refused to certify the lawsuit as a class action, which would have meant anyone who owned a Windows XP PC in mid-2006 could join the case without having to hire an attorney, and on Friday the same judge dismissed the case completely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are a lot of mottos that when you actually think about them, teach you not only how to behave, but how to change. For example -- "Only steal from the best" might sound like an admonition to steal, and it is, but there's more to it. It says you should acknowledge those who inspire you. They're the best. It's important to reward people for letting you stand on their shoulders because it will encourage more people to give generously, believing the generosity will be reciprocated.

Another famous motto: "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer" has a surface meaning, it appears to be practical, and it is -- but at a sub-surface level you learn that enemies brought closer can become friends. Someone you're close with is someone you share intimacies with, that's what closeness is. And over time that develops into trust. Most people you think of as an enemy are probably more like you than you can see. Bring them closer and you see they mean well. Keeping them at a distance preserves their enemy-tude (yeah I've been watching The Big Lebowski).

Which brings me to a parable that I tried to relate this morning on Twitter and raised more questions than I answered. Here, in the longer form, I'll try to leave nothing to the imagination. It's a story of drawing your enemy closer, and getting a benefit.

Early in 2001 I got an email from someone whose name I don't remember (I immediately forgot it) who worked at the NY Times. The email included a link to a public folder on a website. The folder contained sub-folders with the names of various publications and syndication services. Inside each folder were files with names like sports.xml, international.xml, metro.xml, etc. My heart rate went through the roof, my breath drew short, my eyes opened wide, my tongue drooped out of my mouth. I felt as an ancient explorer must have felt when he opened a door and found King Tut's tomb. Oh the wealth. Oh the humanity!

When I looked inside the files I was not disappointed. Here were synopses of all the stories of the day. Everything that was in the print NYT, or on their website, in parsable XML. So I dropped everything and wrote an app in Radio UserLand called nyTimes.root, that read the files in one of the folders every hour and turned out RSS on one of UserLand's servers. Of course I wrote that up on scripting.com, including links to the RSS feeds.

Shortly thereafter, nine years ago to the day, I got a call from a licensing person at the Times, who very politely and nicely requested that I stop. Of course I complied. I knew the call would come. But I hoped it would start the conversation that it did.

The Times could have seen me as an enemy and distanced itself from me. But they took a different approach. They made me legal! A few months later I had a contract that allowed me to include the content in our Radio UserLand product. Of course I didn't hide the sources, a lot of people thought they had made a "discovery" when they found the feeds sort-of hidden in the product, but I knew they'd find them, I wanted them to.

Punchline: Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.

Another motto: Snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Another: Make hay while the sun shines.

Another: Turn a lemon into lemonade.

The wisdom of the ages!

PS: It's even worse than it appears.

The other day I snapped a picture out the window of a sunny sunrise.

This morning, it's a different picture. Snow! Not a lot, at least not yet. But it's here. So Manhattan is not immune, but so far a snowstorm is a lot like a rainstorm. I'll keep you posted as it develops.

Architecture student Ryan McCaffrey made this amazing expanding model from a bunch of pine parallelepipeds with white duct tape hinges. It's called "Jitterbug." [via Dude Craft]

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Barence writes "Opera is launching a version of its Mini browser for the iPhone in what could prove a landmark decision for Apple's app gatekeepers. Apple has been traditionally hostile to rival browsers, with Mozilla claiming that Apple made it "too hard" for its rivals to develop a browser for the iPhone. However, Opera remains bullishly confident that it's app will be approved. "We have not submitted Opera Mini to the Apple App store," an Opera spokesperson told PC Pro. "However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in web browsing experience."" I can't imagine what would motivate them to do that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In America, the 80s brought us Max Headroom and power shoulder pads.

While in China, it was poly-fiber track suits and the omnipresent black handbag.

The "romance and energy of 1980s China" is now captured in Shanghai's new Nengmao store (the original closed last year). The name comes from a misspelling from storeowner Xixi's youth.

He says,"Neng Mao was a tiny misspelling of the word "panda" in pinyin Chinese, that I made in elementary school. For some reason, this mistake always reminds me how silly but sweet childhood is. Now I've made this little misspelled creature come to life and hope to remind everyone of the happiness of our childhood."

The new Nengmao store is in Shanghai's French Concession: Shanxi Nan Lu, Lane 38, No. 96, close to Xinle Lu.

Nengmao products also available online (Chinese only).

?? NeochaEDGE!

DesScorp writes "It seems that there's a grain of truth to one old wives' tale; it turns out that you really can die of a broken heart, especially if you're a post-menopausal woman. The Wall Street Journal reports on a phenomena called 'broken-heart syndrome,' which often occurs after great emotional distress. Quoting: 'In a conventional heart attack, an obstructed artery starves the heart muscle of oxygenated blood, quickly resulting in the death of tissue and potentially permanently compromising heart function. In contrast, the heart muscle in broken-heart-syndrome patients is stunned in the adrenaline surge and appears to go into hibernation. Little tissue is lost.' In the article a doctor notes, 'The cells are alive, but mechanically or electrically disabled.' Documented cases track heart attacks in people with seemingly healthy hearts after the grief of the death of a loved one. Intense feelings can cause the heart actually to change shape. Doctors call this 'tako-tsubo,' after the Japanese phrase for 'octopus trap,' so called because the syndrome was first identified by a Japanese doctor who noticed the strange shape in the left ventricle. Doctors note that while strong emotions like grief are usually associated with the syndrome, stress or a migraine can also trigger such heart attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Analog pins 8-15 on the Arduino Mega been giving you trouble? (perhaps you'd assumed they were fried - I did!) Turns out, due to a problem in Arduino 17, the Mega's second set of analog inputs were temporarily out of service. Thankfully, the issue has been taken care of in the newest release Arduino IDE.

Other notable additions to the software include the tone() frequency generating function and a simpler way to add support for 3rd party hardware (Sanguino, etc) from your sketches folder. Check out the release notes for more.

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Mega

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It looks like the iiNet ruling is already having some positive impact in Australia. The crux of the ruling is that copyright infringement is not an "I know it when I see it" violation, but rather a complex issue that requires a court to weigh in. Asking an ISP to simply assume that someone is infringing, and thus to kick them off, is problematic and potentially goes against basic due process. It appears that other ISPs are now realizing that they were being too hasty in blocking internet access. Competing ISP Exetel, who used to block access to accused file sharers, has now announced a change of policy. Of course, it could have stood up for its customers' rights in the first place, like iiNet did...

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Do you have to take some tabletop product shots in a hurry, but don't have access to studio seamless or a light table? Try this hack. Using plain paper and some binder clips you, too, can assemble your very own light tent. [Thanks, Nathan!]

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How can online journalists improve their design, usability and content creation skills? In this MasterNewMedia report journalist Eric Ulken shares some valuable insights on what online journalists can learn from web interaction designers to improve the way they create, layout and distribute their content. Photo credit: Taketorise Computer Usability and design should always be major concerns when you decide to post or share content on the web. But what if you have written an excellent article and have left it laying somewhere in a shady corner of your website? People may never find it and your great content may likely lose the attention it might really deserve. Remember that the Internet (and your website, on a smaller scale) is like a library. You couldn't just hope to enter a library and stumble upon the information you want. You need a catalog, an index of some sort that comprises all the information available with precise location references. Think about your website. Is your content easy to find? Have you got categories that label all your areas of interest? Do you label your articles with titles that express clearly what you are talking about? Are you visible on search engines? If the answer to most of these questions is "no", here is a simple collection of suggestions you can immediately put to use to leverage what instructional designers recommend when it comes to improve content reach and visibility:

• Personas: In the digital world, it is easier to get a precise profile of an audience, but it still helps to be able to actually "picture" some typical users in your mind. Interaction designers call them "personas" and they can be a useful exercise to put yourself in the shoes of your readers and assess how well you are meeting their needs.
• User feedback: While it is extremely useful, user feedback should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, often users do not really have enough experience using your site to know what they want. Better information can be gleaned by observing how your site is actually used through analytics data and by making changes accordingly.
• User testing: Create two different versions of an element of your website or of a piece of content you have produced, and then show some of your users the "A" version and others the "B" version to determine which version works best.
• Community curation: You should leverage the opportunity to engage and collaborate with your users on the content creation process. For example, you may allow your readers to rate and share your content via social media thus gaining useful data on what your audience favors most.
• Search Engine Optimization: SEO can indeed help you a great deal to make your content findable and visible inside Google and other search engines. Titles, tags, writing style, all these components of your content do contribute to reach all those people who do not come to your web site on a daily basis or are not subscribed to your RSS feed. However, the biggest potential benefit in search engine optimization comes not from fresh content, but rather from the huge volume of archival content that your web sites accrues over time, and that can be re-used and further improved.

Here all the details:

What Online Journalists Can Learn From Information Scientists

by Eric Ulken

Why Journalists Should Think of Website Usability

I recently took part in a fascinating "unconference" in Seattle aimed at information professionals of various stripes - librarians, information architects, interaction designers and the like. It is called InfoCamp, and it seems like a natural venue for online journalists too - though there were few in attendance. The sessions covered such familiar topics as information visualization and user-created content, but from a broader perspective than we journalists usually look. This got me thinking: Why should there be such a gap between the information gatherers (us) and the information organizers (them)? Why do not we look at our content the way librarians do? It begs for classification, cross-linking, mapping and contextualizing. Why do not we look at the design and functionality of our websites the way interaction designers do? Most of our sites would benefit from some serious user testing and usability enhancements. In that spirit, here are some ideas I picked up at InfoCamp that online journalists could steal from information scientists:

Use Personas To Identify Your Audience

At university, I had a broadcast journalism professor who used to implore students to "remember Mabel", a hypothetical retiree who represented the regular news viewers of the small TV station where we worked. When a student would pitch some wacky, avant-garde story idea, the prof. would ask, "Do you think Mabel cares about that?" In the digital world, it is easier to get a more precise picture of the audience, but it still helps to have some typical users in mind. Interaction designers call them "personas", and often give them names and pictures and even biographies. Mabel probably represents only a fraction of the audience of most news sites, but an audience could be typified by several different personas. And, while personas will not give you feedback, it can be a useful exercise to put yourself in their shoes on occasion and assess how well you are meeting their needs - particularly if you are an editor making coverage decisions.

Always Evaluate User Feedback

If there was a theme at InfoCamp, this was it. Information architects and user experience experts repeatedly cautioned that user feedback should be taken with a grain of salt. Of course it is valuable, but often users do not really have enough experience using your site to know what they want, which could result in them asking for features or content they will not use. Better information can be gleaned by observing how your site is actually used - through site analytics and, perhaps, user testing - and making changes accordingly.

Compare, Measure and Test

As user testing goes, it is about the simplest form:

1. You create two different versions of something - say, a design element or textual cue - and show some of your users the "A" version and others the "B" version.
2. Then you measure the behavior of the two groups to determine which version worked best.

You might test user clicks on blue underlined headlines versus black non-underlined headlines to see which results in more clicks, or you might test the language on a button ("Sign up now" versus "Click here to register!"). News sites could extend this idea to the content of headlines. The Huffington Post has experimented with testing two headlines for a story and, after analyzing early results, going with whichever headline generated the most clicks.

Leverage Community Curation

First it was the mechanical term "user-generated content". Then it was "user-created content", which sounded more respectful of the users doing the creation. The next buzzword - though it is a mouthful - could be "community-curated user-created content", the idea that users should be in charge of moderating each other. The jargon is my invention, but the topic was raised in a fascinating discussion on the motivations and behaviors of users who post content to the web. We already see community curation on a lot of sites. Wikipedia is an obvious example, but the idea is also represented in comment boards that allow readers to "vote" posts up and down. Few news sites have seriously embraced community curation, though - perhaps because they fear giving up too much control.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

A slide from Vanessa Fox's keynote presentation on search showed that the proportion of traffic arriving at news, sports and entertainment sites from search engines has grown by as much as 30% year-over-year. This trend underscores the importance of search engine optimization for news websites. Some elements of SEO are technical in nature, but others - such as ensuring key terms are represented in headlines and stories - are the domain of editors. The biggest potential benefit in search engine optimization comes not on breaking news but on the huge volume of archival content that news sites accrue over time. Features such as topics pages can help maximize the findability of archived content through search. (See my previous post on the introduction of curated topics pages at Germany’s Spiegel Online.)

Originally written by Eric Ulken for De Nieuwe Reporter, and first published on November 9th, 2009 as What Online Journalists Can Learn From Information Scientists.

About Eric Ulken Eric Ulken is currently consulting for the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for 5 years until November 2008. From January to April 2010, he will be a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Eric Ulken is also designing an online course on writing headlines for the web for the Poynter Institute’s NewsU. He writes a regular column for De Nieuwe Reporter and he is also an occasional contributor to Online Journalism Review. Eric Ulken is a member of the Online News Association and of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Photo credits: Why Journalists Should Think About Website Usability - Evan Sharboneau Use Personas To Identify Your Audience - Kirsty Pargeter Always Evaluate User Feedback - Phil Date Compare, Measure and Test - Daniel Rajszczak Leverage Community Curation - Lammeyer The Importance of Search Engine Optimization - MacXever

Last year, we warned that treating digital music sales as the savior of the market was a dangerous thing, since there were indications that the market was fragile. In fact, we had already seen that after years of major record labels pleading with Apple to let them raise prices on songs, the initial results suggested a decrease in sales. Well, shockingly enough, it looks like the basic econ 101 concept of price elasticity works in music as well, as Warner Music has finally realized that raising prices of songs to $1.29 has slowed growth in the market. The digital music market, which had been growing pretty rapidly, slowed drastically following this pricing change. Warner Music is claiming that this this is because the market has "matured," but gives no evidence of that whatsoever -- and given the size of the market, that seems highly unlikely. Now, to be clear, the market is still growing, but only at 8% as compared to 20% the year before. And market growth should be expected to decline over time once the market matures, but it's difficult to believe that the digital music market has reached the point of maturity yet. In fact, just a few weeks ago, we wrote about an economic study that suggested that if the labels wanted to maximize revenue on digital sales, they should be lowering prices. But, again, execs at major labels haven't been known to be particularly good with their understanding of economics.

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dark_requiem writes "The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that online content can be judged by the standards of the strictest community that is able to access it. The court upheld the conviction of pornography producer Paul F. Little, aka Max Hardcore, for violating obscenity laws in Tampa, despite the fact that the 'obscene' material in question was produced and sold in California. From the article: 'The Atlanta-based court rejected arguments by Little's attorneys that applying a local community standard to the Internet violates the First Amendment because doing so means material can be judged according to the standards of the strictest communities. In other words, the materials might be legal where they were produced and almost everywhere else. But if they violate the standards of one community, they are illegal in that community and the producers may be convicted of a crime. ... Jurors in Little's trial were told to judge the materials on the basis of how "the average person of the community as a whole — the Middle District of Florida" — would view the material.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mystery Box kit is a clever puzzle box made by our very own John Park, host of Make: television. Here is how it works: first you assemble the laser-cut wooden box, placing a treasure inside. Next, you present the Mystery Box and its hidden contents to a friend, loved one, or enemy. Ask them to not open it, instead encourage them to cherish the Mystery Box and its contents. Maybe they will listen to your suggestion, enjoying the mystery within for generations to come. Then again, maybe they will wait until you leave and eventually figure out how to open this clever wooden box? Who knows? One thing we do know, whoever receives the Mystery Box as a gift will certainly love it!

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Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting: "When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube user gloomyandy demonstrates how to stream 8-bit audio through a NXT brick's crappy speakers via Bluetooth and USB. The trick is to use leJOS, Java-based replacement firmware for the brick. [via The NXT Step]

More:

• NXC: C Language for Mindstorms NXT
• LEGO NXT walker turns from both ends
• LEGO Mindstorms NXT and open source
• LEGO NXT 3D scanner

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Steward Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, has just launched his next act, a web-based multiplayer game called "Glitch." It sounds a lot like the original game behind Flickr, Game Neverending, full of puzzles, whimsy and warmth (like Stewart). The game's in private alpha now, but the intro video and Daniel Terdiman's profiles of the company on CNet are damned exciting:

A new game that went into alpha testing on Tuesday, as reported exclusively by CNET, Glitch (see related behind-the-scenes feature about its development) is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social MMO built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, and better known as the co-founder of Flickr. "So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants' imaginations and grow...the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants' imagination."

While Glitch shares some of the features of hard-core MMOs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest--principally quests, leveling up, an in-game economy and working socially with other players, as a 2D Flash game--it might at the same time feel mildly familiar to players of Facebook games like Farmville or Nintendo titles like the many iterations of the Mario franchise.

In depth with Tiny Speck's Glitch (Thanks, Stewart!)

The next SF in SF free science fiction events is coming up on Feb 13, with guests Jedediah Berry and Laurie R. King:

Jedediah Berry was raised in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and works as the assistant editor of Small Beer Press. The Manual of Detection is his award-winning first novel, now available in hardcover and paperback.

While Laurie R. King's fiction falls into several areas, first in the hearts of most readers comes Mary Russell, who becomes first the apprentice of Sherlock Holmes, and then his partner. Over the course of ten books (and more to come!), Russell and Holmes challenge each other to ever-greater feats of detection, traveling the world from Sussex to Simla. King's other series concerns San Francisco homicide inspector Kate Martinelli, her SFPD partner Al Hawkin, and her life partner Lee Cooper. In the course of her five books, Kate has encountered a female Rembrandt, a modern-day Holy Fool, two difficult teenagers, and a manifestation of the goddess Kali.

Reception begins, and cash bar opens at 6:00PM. Author readings begin at 7:00PM

Each author will read a selection of their work, followed by Q & A moderated by author Terry Bisson. Booksigning and schmoozing in the lounge afterwards. Books for sale at event, courtesy of Borderlands Books

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor - entrance between Quizno's & Citibank
582 Market St., at 2nd @ Montgomery, San Francisco

Jedidiah Berry & Laurie King (Thanks, Rina!)

k33l0r writes "Following Google's announcement ending support for Internet Explorer 6, I find myself wondering whether we (Web developers) really need to continue providing support for IE6 and IE7. Especially when creating Web sites intended for technical audiences, wouldn't it be best to end support for obsoleted browsers? Would this not provide additional incentives to upgrade? Recently I and my colleagues had to decide whether it was worth our time to try to support anything before IE8, and in the end we decided to redirect any IE6/7 user-agent to a separate page explaining that the site is not accessible with IE 6 or 7. This was easy once we saw from our analytics that fewer than 5% of visitors to the site were using IE at all. Have you had to make a choice like this? If so, what was your decision and what was the reasoning behind it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I only know about first impressions of Google Buzz because once I saw what it did to my Gmail inbox, which is a mission-critical app for me, my mission became How do I turn this off?

This came after I learned that it made no attempt whatsoever to be Twitter API-compatible.

It violates the prime directive of new software. It starts turned on, and the way to turn it off is all-but invisible. And it invades a space that heretofore Google helped to protect. One of the big values of Gmail is its spam filter. Now all of a sudden it's as if the exhaust was reversed, and it was spraying dirt into my message stream, instead of filtering it out.

New software should be easy to try out, and there should be no penalty for doing so. Here, they didn't even give us an option, I was automatically signed up, and the way out was hidden. The first bit, which is fun -- create a new post -- is followed by a flood of new messages in a semi-sacred private place, my email inbox.

Bottom-line: There's no good reason why Buzz (terrible name, btw) should be integrated with Gmail. The company showed the worst judgment. It took what was the industry leading web mail product and turned it into a lab experiment. Once I turned it off (it's not hard, there's a switch at the bottom of the Gmail home page), Gmail went back to being Gmail, and not a nightmarish ad for Google's software design ineptness.

After all that, Kevin Rose's analysis is right on. He calls them feature requests -- clever -- but his concerns are so basic, it's another way of saying this should have been labeled pre-pre-beta and should have been opt-opt-opt-in with disclaimers and confirmation on confirmantion, instead of turned on by default for all Gmail users.

The whole concept of "windowing" movie releases makes little sense. It's as if the movie industry purposely wants to make sure customers don't get to consume the content in the format that fits them best at the time when they're putting the most money behind a marketing campaign. It's hard to fathom why they do this, other than the pressure they get from the movie theater companies (which is silly, because the theaters would benefit from this too). Every so often, though, we hear about a moviemaker who seems to understand how to better reach out to an audience. Pranav points us to the news of a new movie out of Bollywood that is being released on YouTube at the same time as its theatrical release. There is a big caveat though: the YouTube videos are only available for international, rather than domestic (Indian) viewers. Also, it looks like US viewers will have to pay to rent it via Google's new YouTube rental program, but those in any other country (outside of the US or India) can view it for free. It's not necessarily ideal (and there doesn't seem to be much of a business model behind the free viewings), but at least it's a step in the right direction.

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Rusty from SomaFM writes,

"The Space Shuttle Endeavour has taken off and is in space, traveling to the International Space Station where it will be delivering parts including the third connecting module known as 'the Tranquility node' to the station. It's also bringing up a seven-windowed cupola to be used as a control room for robotics. The mission will feature three spacewalks."

"You can hear it all mixed with electronic ambient music on SomaFM's Mission Control channel. Just go to somafm.com and click on Mission Control.

"The best time to tune in is around 2pm pacific time (06:00 GMT), when the astronauts are just getting up and starting their checklists for the day. Astronaut sleep periods are approximately from 6am pacific to 2pm pacific. There will be minimal mission audio at that time, but the rest of the time all sorts of stuff is going on."

[CC-licensed image, via Flickr: "STS-130 Shuttle Launch," photographed on Feb 8, 2010 by Malenkov in Exile]

Greg from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association sez,

It's not just the U.S. border guards who want to search the files on your laptop and cellphone. The Canada Border Services Agency has been doing the same thing for years. From U.S. journalist Amy Goodman to a Canadian gay couple whose collection of porn got border agents all hot and bothered, the CBSA likes to look just as much as its counterpart in the U.S.

The biggest difference between U.S. border guards and the CBSA is that the CBSA hasn't made their policy for laptop searches public. Judging by how they've handled the BC Civil Liberties Association's Access to Information request, they'd like to keep it that way.

Back in October 2009, the BCCLA filed an Access to Information Request with the CBSA looking for their policies on searching personal electronics and copying data from them. We got a polite acknowledgement, and we settled in to wait for the 30 days allowed by the Access to Information Act.

On November 30, 2009, we got another letter from the CBSA saying that they'd need another 60 days to meet the request, because a timely response would "unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government institution" and "consultations are necessary to comply with the request." We settled in to wait again.

February 1 came and went. Three months after the original request was filed, the CBSA remains unwilling or unable to provide a single document in response to our request.

We've written up an overview of the file and put the correspondence online. We'll be posting more about this over the next few weeks, and we'll be putting documents online as soon as we get them.

CBSA delays laptop search Access to Information request (Thanks, Greg!)

(Image: Pacific Highway crossing, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from scazon's photostream)

These early electric doorbells by Rene Binet date to the early 1900s (they were used at the 1900 Paris World Fair). Binet was inspired by Ernest Haeckel in his designs.

When electric doorbells were new

While doing research for the next issue of MAKE, I discovered this small company, Centeye, right here in my own Northern, VA backyard. They're developing vision chips for autonomous robotic aircraft. They have several videos on their site, showing various types of tests. Unfortunately, the videos are in WMV format only, and not on YouTube.

The video screen cap above is of a micro helicopter holding its position using only visual information from a ring of six of Centeye's ArzPro sensors, mounted in the yaw plane. No gyro is used. Other videos show obstacle avoidance behaviors and the robot fliers taking control if the operator tries to fly them into something. Cool stuff. We'll have to try and get the engineer behind this to present at a Dorkbot.

Centeye

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Gareth Branwyn says:

We're kicking off our Maker Business series with this piece by Jeffrey McGrew, who along with his wife Jillian Northrup, and their trusty CNC machine named Frank, are a two-person (and a bot) design and fabrication juggernaut. From their design-build studio, Because We Can, in Oakland, CA, they do custom interior design, furniture, and create such artistic wonders as the "Art Golf" course they've set up at Maker Faire. Here, Jeffrey shares some words of advice to those who may be thinking of going "Maker Pro."

Make: Online series: Maker Business

Back at the end of last year, we wrote about how some had noticed that DigiProtect, one of a group of companies that purposely puts files online to see who downloads them, and then threatens them with "pay up or we'll sue" letters, was potentially in trouble in Germany for not following the law. German law says that you can't base "legal costs" on a contingency like winning. Yet, DigiProtect's agreement is that it only gets paid if it can collect on the pre-settlement letters. That goes against the law. And, now, a court has agreed, and found that DigiProtect can't ask for legal fees in Germany unless it can actually prove what those real fees are. The court did offer DigiProtect an out: open your books and show what the real costs are, and how they are paid. DigiProtect refused to do so. This basically cuts out pretty much all of the massive profits DigiProtect and others brag about.

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More details have come about about what was behind PayPal's decision to suspend personal payments to any user in India, as we discussed on Sunday. In a blog post today, PayPal revealed that payments to India will remain in suspension for at least a few months. Customers in India will be able to pull rupees out of the service into their bank accounts within a few days. The suspension came about when Indian government regulators raised questions about whether PayPal's service was enabling remittences (transfers of money by foreign workers) to Indian citizens. "The problems may have been triggered by a marketing push that promotes PayPal as a way to send money abroad, a source familiar with the matter said. The campaign — which reads 'As low as $1.50 to send $300 to countries like India' — may have caught the attention of Indian regulators, the source said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting Light: A Way to See the Wind....

This experimental site-specific installation illustrates alternative, sustainable ways of harnessing energy that will explore the power of the wind in the city, visualizing it as an ephemeral cloud of light. The installation is custom built, using 500 mini wind turbines to generate power, which illuminates hundreds of mounted leds, creating firefly-like fields of light, with wind visually interpreted as electronic patterns across the installation. Wind around the southbank generates the power, creating a unique and thought-provoking light art piece that will delight all ages.

More about the project "Wind to Light" at Jason Bruges studio site... More:

• Wind powered light
• Wind-Sensitive Light-Up Dress
• Wind-triggered garden light
• Wind-up Bedside Lamp
• HOW TO - Make a a wind-up headboard reading light

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This Transformeresque giant metal guardian, made largely of junked car parts, was reportedly built by a company called Transinvestservice (TIS) outside the city of Odessa in the Ukraine. There's more pics over at English Russia. [via Neatorama]

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We're still confused by some news publications' war against those who send them traffic. We've already covered some newspapers choosing technical means of blocking aggregators, which is effective cutting off your nose to spite your face, but what about just claiming that it's illegal? That seems to be the plan of a major Icelandic newspaper, who has put up a new policy that bans " repeated and systematic" linking to the website (Boing Boing's coverage implies it bans all deep linking, but that does not appear to be the case). This definitely seems targeted at aggregators, but I'm really not sure how that makes much of a difference anyway. First off, blocking links seems like a silly way to go about running a media publication, but second, just declaring that it's not allowed doesn't make much sense. If you really don't know how to capitalize on incoming traffic, then just use technical means. Insisting "it's not allowed" when your webserver says "yes, it's allowed!" doesn't make much sense.

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Look what happens on this podcast when the host clicks the button to play the podcast.

Google announced Buzz today, as we anticipated this morning. CNET has a workmanlike description of the social-networking service, which is integrated into gmail. CNET identifies a central obstacle Buzz will have to overcome to gain traction: "The problem, however, will be the increasing backlash Google is seeing from the general public over how much data the company already controls on their online habits." Buzz is being rolled out over the next few days so some people will see a Buzz folder in their gmail, but most won't yet (this Twitter post explains how Safari users can get an early glimpse). A blog posting up at O'Reilly Answers points out some of the distinguishing characteristics of Google Buzz — one interesting one being its ability to post an update either pubilcly or privately, at the user's option. This design choice places it between the public-by-default Twitter and the private-by-default Facebook. Lauren Weinstein sounds a note of caution about the inherent privacy risks of Google's method of filling out initial friend profiles by automatic friending.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When concern over ACTA secrecy started picking up a few months ago, one of the industry lobbyist talking points that floated out was "don't worry about ACTA, because it's not a 'treaty' but an 'executive agreement' and thus, it can't impact US law." An IP lawyer in our comments keeps making this point over and over again, and arguing that anyone who argues otherwise doesn't understand the Constitution. Of course, that's silly. In response to that guy in particular, I'd been doing more research to understand the real differences between a "treaty" and an "executive agreement" and realized that pretty much everyone (including people at the State Departement) admit that the only substantive differences is that you don't need 2/3 Senate approval for an executive agreement. Otherwise, in every way, it's just like a treaty. Basically, it's a way to end-run around a treaty that wouldn't get approval. I'd been meaning to write up something about this, but it looks like Andrew Moshirnia of the Citizen Media Law Project has beaten me to it and done an excellent job ripping apart the "but it's just an executive agreement" argument:

When lobbyists and the USTR insist that ACTA won't change laws very much, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Of course it changes the law, why else would it need to be negotiated in secret and why else would it attract so much industry attention and support....

Executive agreements essentially give the President a means to unilaterally control the foreign relations of the United States. Presidents have historically used accords with foreign nations to conclude international pacts without giving the Senate a meaningful opportunity to interfere. See The Destroyers for Bases Deal, Yalta, The Vietnam Peace Agreement of 1973.  The constitutionality of this tool is somewhat dubious: the Constitution does not mention executive agreements, nor do the framers discuss the concept in either the constitutional convention or the Federalist Papers. The judiciary has defended the use of congressional-executive agreements*, provided that these do not conflict with the Constitution. See Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957).   But hopefully the Court would be more likely to strike down unilateral Executive Agreements. But see U.S. v. Pink 315 U. S.  203, 229 (1942). However, the prospect of an executive agreement is rarely an issue because the mere presence of an existing agreement places an incredible amount of pressure on Congress to go along with the deal.

There have been some congressional efforts to restrain the use of executive agreements and to reestablish the primacy of Congress' Treaty Power. In 1954, the Bricker and George Amendments, which would have restricted the president's power to craft executive agreements, failed to clear the Senate, the latter by only a single vote.

While the President has the power to utilize executive agreements, he is not to keep them secret. Eighteen years after the Bricker and George amendments barely failed, and only a few years after the discovery of covert executive agreements with Laos and South Korea, Congress passed the Case Act of 1972. The Act requires the Executive to disclose within 60 days the text of "any international agreement" in which the United States is involved. But this does little to redress the problem of unilateral executive agreements because presidents routinely ignore the statute.

Moshirnia then wonders if the massive unpopularity surrounding ACTA and the process will put renewed attention on this questionable practice of executive agreements:

So to sum up: I am terrified that ACTA is going to be as monstrous as I believe it to be and that the United States will join the agreement by executive fiat. But maybe some good will come out of this--maybe the deep unpopularity of ACTA (trust me, people want their Internet) will force Congress to finally reassert its long neglected Treaty Power and curtail the use of executive agreements. While the Congress has deferred to the President in matters of war, there is no need to maintain such deference if ACTA empowers national ISPs to sever domestic Internet connections. None of this worrying would be necessary if the administration would simply (1) make the ACTA negotiations public, and (2) agree to submit ACTA to the Senate for formal ratification as a treaty. The longer this remains secret, the more users will worry. 

Let your Senators and Representative know that this pointless secrecy is unacceptable. Perhaps your demand will inspire them (either through pride or fear) to reclaim their treaty power and back out of a deal to which they never agreed. 

And... the next time your friendly industry lobbyist insists that ACTA is "not a treaty" so you have nothing to worry about, go ahead and explain why that's incorrect.

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What a great idea, Riley Porter's lasercut organizer for an Arduino, a solderless breadboard, and small compartments for components.

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When the concept of doing a Projects: Failure something came up years ago, originally as the idea for a Make: Books (in case you hadn't realized, "Projects: Failure" is a silly twist on our "Make: Projects" book series brand), we were talking about how it could be story-driven, people sharing spectacular failures and what they learned from them. I blurted out: "Oh, like mounting a scratch monkey!" Everyone looked at me like I'd forgotten to take my meds (again). But I've never stopped associating this idea with the scratch monkey. I've brought it up several times since we've launched this series online, and each time, people tilt their heads sideways like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. So, here's the scratch monkey story.

The term "scratch monkey," or the adage "always mount a scratch monkey," comes from a tragic, allegedly actual, incident that took place 1979/1980, at the University of Toronto. It became a cautionary tale that floated through early netspace, especially USENET newsgroups, and a number of different versions emerged. It became part of the hacker lexicon, part of the venerable Jargon File, and then part of the resulting Hacker's Dictionary. Here's an excerpt of the entry from The New Hacker's Dictionary (3rd Edition):

As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey," a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.

There's definitely a key lesson in there about projects that fail and what one can learn from them: never commit resources to a project you can't afford to lose if something goes wrong and to test your project first in ways that won't destroy it (or key components) if something goes awry. How many times have you (have I) committed that last crucial part or piece of material, or whatever, to a build and then had it get ruined? So, when in doubt, if you can: always mount a scratch monkey!

BTW: The version told in the Jargon File/New Hacker's Dictionary claims it came directly from the sysadmin involved in the incident. But the AFU and Urban Legends site questions this. Here's part of their entry:

Current University of Toronto sysadmins have expressed skepticism. For one thing, in almost all versions of the story, including the ostensibly documented one in the Jargon File, the computer is a VAX; at the time a VAX would have been a very unusual platform for this kind of data acquisition (they used PDP-11s). The Toronto zoology department has never been licensed to work with primates; the only section of the university that could have done experiments of this nature was the School of Medicine. Investigation continues

.

Let's hope it isn't true, no monkeys were harmed in the making of this cautionary tale, and you can still benefit from the moral of the story either way.

Here's the rest of the Jargon File entry.

Here's the Wikipedia page with some links to some of the variations on the story.

More:

• Projects: Failure and the cover of MAKE, Volume 06
• What Was I Thinking? Part 1: Light fishture

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An anonymous reader writes "Ksplice, the company based on the MIT Ksplice project, is now offering its 'never reboot' service for Red Hat, Debian, and other Linux distros. You subscribe and get real-time kernel security updates that apply in-memory instead of rebooting. Last summer we discussed the free service for Ubuntu. Cool tech, but will people really pay $4 a month for this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.